SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS.- Photographer Richard Avedon, one of the most influential American portrait and fashion photographers, died Friday in Texas at age 81. Mr. Avedon had suffered a brain hemorrhage last month while on assignment for New Yorker magazine, taking pictures for a commission titled "On Democracy."

Richard Avedon was born in 1923 in New York City. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, but never completed an academic education. In 1942 he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine Photographic Department and, when he returned, attended the Design Laboratory taught at The New School by legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. As a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and later for Vogue, Avedon became well known for his stylistically innovative fashion work, often set in vivid and surprising locales. In 1992 he was named the first staff photographer in the history of The New Yorker.

Avedon’s success in fashion photography is widely recognized. (In 1956 his brilliant early career was fictionalized in the Hollywood musical Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer "Dick Avery.") Unlike the fashion work, however, most of Avedon’s portraits did not issue from commercial assignments but from personal convictions and were solicited by the artist himself. Each is a virtuoso reckoning with human complexities and contradictions and a powerful expression of this artist’s distinctive vision.

With uncompromising directness, Avedon portrayed his subjects against a bright, white, seamless background, with no props or extraneous details to distract from their person—from the essential specificity of face, gaze, dress, and gesture. When everything extraneous is stripped away, what remains is a remarkable intensity of characterization. The people in Avedon’s photographs seem posed to walk right out of their frames, immediately recognizable and wholly alive down to the most telling detail.