“People who you’ve read about or know about – there they are looking right at you.” Art curator Kara Vander Weg is talking with me about global art gallery Gagosian’s major new Richard Avedon retrospective, in which 150 individuals – ranging from the younger Barbara Bush to Khloé Kardashian to Spike Lee to Elton John to Renata Adler to Vander Weg herself – each selected a single Avedon photo to celebrate. She’s explaining the intimacy that she believes sets Avedon’s photos apart. “His subjects are looking right at you, and you can look right at them. You can’t help but react to the human right there in front of you.”
Avedon was monumental for the size of his photos, which tended to be printed in life-size or larger, leading to the effect that Vanger Weg described, where viewers can look right at his subjects and have an encounter that feels extremely intimate. “It’s a really interesting relationship between art and the viewer,” she told me. “Avedon must have known. He would work for months and months with models trying to find the right sizes of images. He must of known that humans in the room would relate to the images in a really special way. That’s what it is about these photographs, you’re looking in the eyes of another person. You can’t help but connect.”
