Have Avedon

Certain names in photography will just forever pop out at me because of my lifelong addiction to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the others. The late Richard Avedon is one of those names, and the Jeu de Paume museum near the American Embassy opened its doors last month to an exhibit of his photographs, from 1946 up to his death in 2004.

Avedon’s signature move was the all-white background, and most of the shots at Jeu de Paume are portraits of the rich and famous: Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, Salman Rushdie, Tina Turner, Truman Capote, etc. A lot of his fashion shots are represented too, and they run the old 1995 PBS documentary Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light in the auditorium four times a day. Pops and I saw another Avedon exhibition in the late nineties, maybe at MoMA, so most of these shots were oldies but goodies to me: like the gigantic, wall-length Andy Warhol and Members of The Factory (1969).

I caught the show with Thierry René, a black French actor (that rare thing) I met through a friend of my wife. Might be able to drag my latest homie to the Annie Leibovitz show going on over at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie right now. We spent the rest of the afternoon in an hours-long male bonding convo at the Hôtel Costes. Never drank there before, but it’s where I interviewed Oscar winner Marion Cotillard last year (she stuck me with the check), and m’man Nelson George crashed there last time he came to town.

Here’s Charlie Rose, on Avedon and Leibovitz: