NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian has recently presented Avedon 100, a landmark exhibition in celebration of the centenary of Richard Avedon’s birth. Prior to its opening on May 4, 2023, in New York, the collection of Avedon photographs was selected by more than 150 people—including prominent artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion world representatives—who elaborate on the impact of the photographer’s work today. The event will end on June 24th, 2023.

Avedon 100 documents Avedon’s enduring influence on photography and profound global impression on visual culture. In an installation designed by Stefan Beckman, the exhibition represents six decades of his oeuvre, including the In the American West series and images of the social justice movement, as well as classic portraiture, advertising, and fashion work. It features both iconic and rare photographs, among them several of Avedon’s larger-than-life-size mural prints, as well as exhibition prints created for his 1978 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The photographs are displayed in loosely chronological sequence, with special attention paid to visual cadence, together showing how the artist dissolved the lines between photographic genres and cemented the medium’s status as a contemporary art form. In an increasingly digital world, his work is also testament to the artistry of film photography.

Among the many remarkable images on view are Avedon’s rarely exhibited mural featuring multiple images of a dancing Marilyn Monroe, created from a sitting in 1957 that also produced his iconic “sad” Marilyn. His dynamic 1971 portrait of Tina Turner is printed at a monumental scale and was selected for the exhibition by Tonne Goodman. In many cases the link between a photograph and its selector enhances the work’s already powerful impact. Hillary Clinton, for example, has chosen Avedon’s 2003 portrait of her for The New Yorker, while Taryn Simon sought out a 1994 image of Salman Rushdie, inscribed by Avedon to the writer “Yours, in the struggle—Dick,” and loaned by Rushdie for exhibition. Among many extraordinary images selected by figures from the worlds of fashion and film are Miuccia Prada’s choice, a 1979 portrait of thirteen-year-old Texas rattlesnake skinner Boyd Fortin from In the American West, and Emma Watson’s, a 1965 photograph of Donyale Luna, who would become the first Black model to grace the cover of American Vogue.

An illustrated catalogue featuring a foreword by Larry Gagosian and essays by Gagosian Quarterly executive editor Derek Blasberg, poet and professor Jake Skeets (whose uncle, Benson James, is featured in the show), and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, associate professor of history of art and architecture and African and African American studies at Harvard University, and the founder of the Vision & Justice Project, has been published to accompany the exhibition. The book makes clear Avedon’s significant impact on visual culture through reproductions of photographs that reveal the enormous and fascinating diversity of his subjects, while the full commentary offered by the selectors underscores the breadth and endurance of his inspiration. Over the course of seventeen thematic chapters, the book’s many esteemed contributors discuss their selected images in short texts that reflect their individual passions and areas of expertise. In the chapter “An Enormous Leap,” commentators including Vince Aletti, Sofia Coppola, and Gerard Malanga discuss Avedon’s photographs in terms of motion, narration, and inclusivity. “Era of Enchantment,” a chapter focused on the myriad innovations of postwar fashion, includes meditations on the subject from Rebecca Arnold, Hamish Bowles, Pamela Golbin, and Wendy Goodman. And in “The Right Story to Tell,” David Adjaye, Trevor Baldwin, Awol Erizku, Anna Deavere Smith, and others reflect on Avedon’s crucial visual documentation of the civil rights movement in collaboration with his childhood friend James Baldwin.

The selectors include David Adjaye, Renata Adler, Vince Aletti, Dara Allen, Hilton Als, Amy Arbus, Delphine Arnault, Rebecca Arnold, Caroline Avedon, John Avedon, Laura Avedon, Matthew Avedon, Michael Avedon, William Avedon, Trevor Baldwin, Adam Bartos, Jamie Bernstein, Derek Blasberg, Hamish Bowles, Ken Burns, Barbara Bush, Naomi Campbell, Tyrone Casby, Serena Cattaneo Adorno, Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, Alexa Chung, Pat Cleveland, Hillary Clinton, Petra Collins, Chris Colls, Anderson Cooper, Sofia Coppola, Cindy Crawford, Cecilia Dean, Jacqueline de Ribes, Rineke Dijkstra, Ava DuVernay, Edward Enninful, Awol Erizku, Nicola Erni, Roe Ethridge, Linda Evangelista, Tom Ford, Susan Forristal, Larry Gagosian, Kara Glynn, Pamela Golbin, Thelma Golden, Tonne Goodman, Wendy Goodman, Blake Gopnik, Ethan James Green, André Gregory, Andreas Gursky, Patti Hansen, Erin Harris, Virginia Heckert, Ron Howard, Anjelica Huston, Lauren Hutton, Iman, Inez and Vinoodh, Frederick Iseman, Marc Jacobs, Tim Jefferies, Elton John, Beverly Johnson, Milla Jovovich, James Kaliardos, Kim Kardashian, Adrienne Kennedy, Sebastian Kim, Calvin Klein, Karlie Kloss, Leonard Lauder, Spike Lee, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Peter MacGill, Amanda Maddox, Gerard Malanga, Sally Mann, Wynton Marsalis, James Martin, Phyllis Bond McMillan, Michael Meeropol, Robert Meeropol, Sarah Meister, Polly Mellen, Roderick Mitchell, Tyler Mitchell, Julianne Moore, Pamela Morgan, Kate Moss, Joel Motley, Kate Mulleavy, Laura Mulleavy, Barbara Mullen, Samira Nasr, Madeline Norris, David O’Connor, Denise Oliver-Velez, Marta Ortega Pérez, Guido Palau, Paloma Picasso, Jack Pierson, François Pinault, Miuccia Prada, Law Roach, John Rohrbach, Carine Roitfeld, Mark Ronson, Paul Roth, Robert M. Rubin, Eiichiro Sakata, Britt Salvesen, Antwaun Sargent, Jenny Saville, Claudia Schiffer, Rebecca Senf, Chloë Sevigny, Stephanie Seymour, Ivan Shaw, Susan Sherrick, Brooke Shields, Taryn Simon, Raf Simons, Jake Skeets, Anna Deavere Smith, Cherri Stamps-McCray, Stan Stokowski, Renitta Mitchell Sweet, Robin Tattersall, Twyla Tharp, Erik Torstensson, Shawn Tower, Penelope Tree, Christy Turlington, Amber Valletta, Kara Vander Weg, Donatella Versace, Veruschka, Nicholas Vreeland, Ginny Heyman Waldman, Elsie Walker, Tim Walker, Jeff Wall, Emma Watson, Marla Weinhoff, Will Welch, Anna Weyant, Diana Widmaier-Ruiz-Picasso, Deborah Willis, Nicole Wisniak, Jordan Wolfson, Jonas Wood, Andrew Wylie, and Kara Young.

Richard Avedon was born in New York in 1923 and died in San Antonio in 2004. Collections include the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and numerous others worldwide. Avedon’s first museum retrospective was held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, in 1962; many lifetime major institutional exhibitions followed, including at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (1970); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1978 and 2002); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1994); and, posthumously, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2007, traveled to Fondazione FORMA per la Fotografia, Milan, Italy; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Foam, Amsterdam; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through 2010). Avedon established the Richard Avedon Foundation in 2004 as the repository for his photographs, negatives, publications, papers, and other archival materials.