During the launch of the Richard Avedon People exhibition I was lucky enough to hear a Q and A session with Katrina Dumas who came over from The Richard Avedon Foundation. Aside from learning more about the collection and the man, I was left pondering about the amount of control artists have over their work, and whether they should let their art go out into the world, or keep it locked away. Here’s some of what I learnt.
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Richard Avedon © The Ponder Room
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Ms Dumas explained that Avedon had a circle of creative friends and other artists, and he would consult his friends and colleagues a lot. He’d think not only as a photographer, but also as an artist, and consider what he had to do with his canvas.
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Katrina Dumas at Richard Avedon © The Ponder Room
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A lot of images in the archive have not been seen since the 1960s when they were originally photographed.
‘He amassed such an enormous collection of material over six decades, many thousands of negatives and prints. There are images that exist as negatives or contacts that will never be printed,’explained Ms Dumas.
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How wonderful in this day and age when commercialism rules that an organisation has kept a man’s wishes alive and refused to show the images.
- How sad that the world doesn’t get to see them, that they will remain in the vault as negatives for ever. What Avedon-inspired insights into people, places and times have we missed out on?
- The good news is that one of his descendants, Michael, is a budding photographer, so perhaps we will see the likes of his works again in the future.
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Worth going
2 Comments
I went to the exhibition and enjoyed, though I thought some of the nudity was unecessary
Glad you got to see it Rae, some iconic pieces in there.