How to read Richard Avedon

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Figure 1. Richard Avedon Exhibition.

Berlin, 2008. Courtesy of Shervin Afshar.

Relying on earlier work on metaphor by Black, Lakoff and Johnson, Forceville and others, this investigation explores the practices of photographic sequencing used by American media photographer Richard Avedon, and interrogates the circumstances under which a photographic sequence might qualify as a pictorial metaphor. Avedon’s sequences often depend on claims of similarity among photographic subjects, and they expose a gap in existing theories of pictorial metaphor, which can only function by translating purely visual content into verbal equivalents.

Avedon’s work suggests the possibility of a theory of metaphor that is purely visual in both its expression and interpretation.

Erik Palmer Pages 147–161

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D

espite the fame, the long career, and the apparent cultural significance of American media photographer Richard Avedon, few independent scholars have undertaken theoretically based inquiries into his photographs and practices.

Lightly studied in the academy, characterized by a critical legacy of entrenched oppositions, and shaped by Avedon’s own career-long attempt to tightly control the discourse about his work, the photographer’s history might appear to offer little opportunity to open up a meaningful scholarly conversation.

This article, and its underlying research, seeks to create such an opening. My entry point for accomplishing that goal is an investigation into an aspect of Avedon’s practice that has frequently received comment, but which has never been described in detail: Avedon’s techniques and tactics of photographic design and montage.

The findings in this article derive from a detailed study of 16 books and essays of photography produced by Avedon during his lifetime, a survey that included the creation of a systematic catalog of all of the photographs included in each volume. Avedon typically exercised a great deal of control over the presentation of his work in print, no matter what the outlet, so his books provide a useful and manageable corpus for scholarly inquiry.

been exhibited in major art museums around the world, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Among his most famous single accomplishments was the 1985 exhibition of In The American West, featuring the results of Avedon’s controversial 5-year intervention into the lives of so-called ordinary residents of the American territory west of the Mississippi.

Despite Avedon’s great commercial and institutional success, he is a polarizing figure among those who have written critically of his work. Many have characterized him as a commercial interloper in the domain of authentic artistry (including Kozloff (1994) and Soar (2003)). Others have challenged the ethical foundations of Avedon’s practices, both at the level of his individual relationships with the people he photographed and at a larger political and cultural level (including Kozloff (1994), Bolton (1989), Krukowski (1990), and Danto (2000)). Although Avedon was among the most dominant men in the history of the mediated representation of women, Patricia Vettel-Becker appears to be the only academic scholar who has interrogated any part of his life and work from a critical feminist perspective (2005).

Just Another Media Photographer?

Who was Richard Avedon, and what might be his importance to modern mass media scholarship? After gaining initial fame as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, Avedon expanded his practice into the domains of celebrity, cultural, and fine art portraiture, and continued working in magazine photography almost literally until the day of his death in 2004.

In opposition to Avedon’s many critics, his equally numerous advocates have credited him with breaking down an arbitrary and creatively limiting barrier between art and commerce (Livingston, 1994, P. 23), with the transformation of fashion photography from simple illustration to existentialist praxis (Gopnik, 1994, P. 111), with the creation of portraits that enact Sartrean authenticity (Dubiel, 1989), with an empathic relationship with many of the people he photographed, especially the women (Sargeant, 1958; Hollander, 2005), and with the exploration of a power imbalance between modern mass media institutions and individuals (Leo, 1995). Leo’s interpretation is particularly interesting for his take on the way Avedon himself signifies the power of the mass media.

Known for his exercise of tight control over the process and outcomes of his photographic practice, Avedon’s practices represent both the larger power of capitalist mass media, and the possibility of resistance by the individual, according to Leo.

Avedon’s life also inspired a Hollywood musical (Funny Face, in 1957), and his photographs have

Other recent scholarship has approached Avedon via studies of novelist James Baldwin, a close

In this article, I emphasize examples observed in Avedon’s An Autobiography (1993), but I believe that many of the principles of photographic design suggested by the autobiography would properly inform an analysis of Avedon’s other books. Furthermore, I believe the description of the narrative techniques of Avedon’s books can yield findings that can be generalized to other forms of mass media, including magazine pages and print advertising.

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friend and collaborator of the photographer’s, and have taken favorable positions regarding the photographer (Miller, 2000; Blair, 2007).

In most cases, I will describe Avedon’s practices by using the term metaphor in a way that is unconventional, but which I think is supportable within the word’s formal definition. In the Avedonian system, a metaphor is the association of two of more photographs based on a shared attribute of similarity, and in a way that uses similarity to convey meaning. The shared attribute is typically discernable based on a visual examination of the photographs, but not always.

My use of metaphor also differs subtly from my use of juxtaposition, a term that describes a spatial relationship in the design of a publication or exhibition.

Method & Dialog In my attempt to investigate Avedon’s photography, I pursue a kind of reading or interpretation of a reasonably clearly bounded set of cultural texts. However, I simultaneously find it valuable to deal with Avedon’s intentions and the meanings that he sought to convey with his photographs, and also skeptical of a semiotic or hermeneutic approach that seeks to reveal the hidden secrets of Avedon.

By taking these positions, I involve myself in an epistemological tradition exemplified by the philosophical hermeneutics proposed by HansGeorg Gadamer (1975). Gadamer advocated a practice of interpretation that recognized the inescapable alterity of texts and their creators, but which also sought basic understanding as its goal. Elaborating on the model of Socratic dialectic, Gadamer framed his approach as one that is dialogical and conversational, and which is characterized by a good-faith effort at understanding among participants in the dialog (Dallmayr, 1989).

Metaphor & Meaning Viewed from the perspective of academic metaphor theory, my choice might prove controversial. As well described in Forceville’s work on visual metaphors in advertising (1996), the term metaphor features a number of commonly accepted attributes when applied within metaphor theory, but many scholars also adopt and use alternate definitions of the concept. Forceville relies primarily on the guidance of Black’s interaction theory of metaphor (1962, 1979) and Lakoff and Johnson’s theories of conceptual metaphors (2008), and he provides a powerful set of arguments for following the assertions of those theorists rigorously.

Among the products of my survey of Avedon’s work, I identified 16 published objects that warranted consideration as long form photographic narratives for the purpose of this inquiry; in those books I enumerated 1402 images made by Avedon; and I tracked 641 cases where a particular image was published in more than one book. Within this corpus, I identified photographs made as early as 1932 and as late as 2004, and I tracked the name, gender, and ethnicity of every person photographed, in the cases where that information was provided in the book or available by secondary research. Nearly all of the photographs in this corpus are portraits, with only a handful of still lifes, landscapes, or other genres included.

I began my inquiry by stating and then attempting to test this claim: that Avedon’s control of the selection, sequencing, and graphic design of his images comprised a self-aware means for the construction and communication of knowledge. Moreover, Avedon’s presentation strategies produced an order of knowledge distinct from the meanings conveyed by his individual photographs, one that depends on the association of the fundamental building blocks of his photographs.

Pages 147–161

Forceville asserts that a metaphor can be understood as the association of two and only two terms; each of which resides in distinct domains of experience or knowledge; and which are related in the sense that one of the two terms is understood in terms of the other (1996, P. 08).

This last claim further implies a hierarchical relationship between the terms, in Forceville’s analysis. Forceville offers for consideration a number of studies of visual metaphor in which each of these criteria are violated or rejected, and he refutes them by adhering to close readings of Black. Forceville further rejects any claim about the reversibility of the implied hierarchy of pictorial metaphors in his critique (2002) of Noel Carroll’s work on visual metaphor in film (1994, 1996).

In the case of Avedon’s visual discourses, Forceville provides a promising template for analyzing the photographs at hand consistently with important past work in metaphor theory.

However, his findings fail to provide a conclusive answer to a key problem in the analysis of Avedon’s work, and perhaps in the analysis of

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still visual content in the media in general: if not metaphor, what should we call a sequence of two or more photographs that conveys meaning by making a claim of similarity, which depends on both images to make its claim, and which intends to convey some deeper, metaphorical, or quasi-metaphorical meaning?

Furthermore, can two (or more) images serve as metaphors for each other? Although his method is not stated as concretely and rigorously as Forceville’s, Linnar Priimägi proposes the possibility of purely visual metaphors based on the a brute force comparison of two paintings (2002), and Avedon’s photographic sequences are promising opportunities for similar consideration.

Here is a concrete example drawn from Avedon’s canon. In An Autobiography, Avedon includes a two-page spread (Figure 3) with side-by-side portraits of Los Angeles fashion designer James Galanos and Denver shipping clerk David Beason.

This juxtaposition is an Avedonian claim of resemblance. Both men wear open jackets that partially expose the skin of their chests. Both jackets feature adorned pockets and sleeves, the designer’s with a printed handkerchief and metallic buttons, the clerk’s with a pattern of metallic studs. Both men slouch such that their weight is distributed on their right legs and their left shoulders are raised. Galanos and Beason appear to be about the same age, and share an impassive facial expression. Both stand before a blank white background. Both are stylish, or at least style-conscious, although in very different ways. According to a claim made by Adam Gopnik prior to the publication of An Autobiography, the connection of the two images expresses the fundamental Avedonian type “androgynous gentleman” (1987).

Within the terms of the metaphor theory advocated by Forceville, we might properly conceive of each photograph as a metaphor for the abstract concept of androgynous gentlemen, and that is probably a useful interpretation. But a finding such as that misses or ignores the importance of the sequence, and interpreting these photographs as a pair of independent metaphors would almost certainly be unintelligible. It is the claim of similarity between the two images that makes this expression intelligible as a metaphor, or at least intelligible as an example of visual metaphorical communication.

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But, we also have to acknowledge that this particular example does not fit the criteria applied

by Forceville in his inquiry. While it does execute a comparison between two domains (Avedon’s photographs and the abstract notion of androgynous gentlemen), it does not clearly assert a priority or direction between the two domains (are we to understand Beason and Galanos in terms of Avedon’s concept of androgynous gentlemen, or are we to understand Avedon’s concept of androgynous gentlemen in terms of Beason and Galanos?), and it is not clear whether we are talking about two domains (the photographic sequence and the concept) or three (a wealthy man, a working class man, and the concept). So we are left with a photographic discourse that tentatively fits some requirements of Black’s analysis of metaphor, but not all.

In this particular case, whatever metaphorical or quasi-metaphorical meaning we might take from Avedon’s association of these two photographs depends on the unity proposed by the juxtaposition. Forceville offers further promising guidance with his proposal of four categories of pictorial metaphor: metaphors with one pictorially present term, metaphors with two pictorially present terms, pictorial similes, and verbo-pictorial metaphors. His category of pictorial simile requires two pictorially present terms and a claim of similarity, and is probably the most promising for dealing with this particular case. However, Forceville both acknowledges the ambiguity of the distinction between simile and metaphor (P. 141), and shies away from drawing concrete conclusions on the validity of his claims about pictorial simile, saying that further research is required (P. 145).

Semiotic theory in the tradition of Roland Barthes points to other possibilities for understanding sequences of photographs as richly meaningful communication. Although Barthes did not undertake any extended consideration of sequences of images, he suggested that sequencing could be an important consideration in the creation of connotative meaning in his essay The Photographic Message (1977, P. 24). Barthes also provided another potential model for analyzing sequences of images that could be adapted to a corpus such as Avedon’s when he undertook a line-by-line interpretive reading of Balzac’s Sarassine in S/Z (1970). Barthes arbitrarily divided Balzac’s novella into chunks of text of variable length called Lexia, and he systematically interpreted each Lexia according to a conceptual schema. Barthes also analyzed the verbal and 150

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visual elements of advertisements (1977), and inspired subsequent research into the signifying role played by the association of product photographs and other photographs in commercial messages (Rose, 2007). However, the application of these founding ideas of semiotic theory appear to be underdeveloped in subsequent research into the sequencing of photographs in the way proposed by Avedon’s work. Forceville cites Barthes extensively in his study, and does not appear to conceive of semiotics as a separate domain of inquiry from metaphor theory (PP. 71–74).

of photographic design and montage clearly in the domain of the political, and perhaps also in the metaphorical.

What does it mean that Avedon calls two photographs similar? As an example, the case of Galanos and Beason is a little bit loaded. The formal and descriptive elements by which the two men or their photographs could be called similar are apparent and easy to call out.

Although not known specifically as a selfportraitist, Avedon included several portraits of himself in his books. Based on their juxtaposition with other photographs, Avedon’s self-portraits constitute key nodes in the networks of meaning deployed by the Avedonian discourse. These pairings provide the evidence that I find most compelling regarding the underlying intellectual framework of Avedon’s practices. These instances demonstrate that Avedon often made photographs as a practice of interrogation of cultural categories such as race and gender, and presented them with the hope of expressing concrete ideas within those domains.

Black Like Me My concluding argument regarding the politics of otherness embedded in Avedon’s practices presents a few key instances where his photographs and their presentation by him subvert the presumed hierarchy of self and other. These propositions function by implicating Avedon’s own body into the politics of race and gender and the delineation of self and other.

Other examples where some overt similarity between two sequenced photographs seems to be the point of their placement include Avedon’s juxtaposition of a 1932 snapshot of his sister Louise with a 1958 portrait of artist Alberto Giacometti (both of whom are playfully kneeling); his western diptych of Texas prisoners Jesus Cervantes and Manuel Heredia (who might be indistinguishable to the casual observer except for the fact that Cervantes is missing an arm and the difference of the tattoos of the Christian Jesus on each subject’s chest); and his placement of mod-eyeglass-wearing fashion model Simone next to a portrait of amply bespectacled vice president Nelson Rockefeller (Figure 4). Each of these examples appears in An Autobiography (1993), and each could properly be interpreted as a metaphorical or quasi-metaphorical claim about the people photographed: that they are playfully child-like, or fashioned, or optically compromised.

Each of the examples that I have presented so far helps to illustrate Avedon’s formal approach to montage, but what about the ideas behind his photography? For those who support an interpretation of Avedon as primarily a commercial agent, and his book production as primarily about surface and style, these techniques might seem like a very high level of game-playing, with little relevance to any underlying meaning Avedon might have sought to convey.

I will continue by presenting an extended example that refutes such an interpretation of Avedon, and which helps to locate his techniques Pages 147–161

I emphasize here three self-portraits that Avedon included in An Autobiography (1993). Each of these photographs is interesting on its own terms.

However, consistently with the systematic use of metaphorical visual techniques that I have described previously, Avedon pairs his own visual representation with particularly intriguing partners in the construction of his self-narrative.

These self-juxtapositions strike to the heart of Avedon’s beliefs about the interrelationship of photographic portraiture, race and gender.

Also in each case, Avedon’s self-portrait interrogates the boundaries of gender through its pairing with a photograph of a woman. The first matches a self-portrait made by Avedon in a photomat booth in 1965 with a documentary photograph of an anonymous African American woman, made in Harlem in the 1940s (Figure 2).

The second pairs a 1980 self-portrait made by Avedon in the style of his western portraits with one of his most famous celebrity portraits, a 1957 photograph of an uncharacteristically disconsolate Marilyn Monroe (Figure 5). And the third pairs another photomat portrait of Avedon, from 1964, with a photograph of a subversively exhibitionistic gesture by fashion supermodel Stephanie Seymour (Figure 6). The 1992

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photograph of Seymour rattles the cage of conventional interpretations regarding the play of masculine voyeurism and feminine exhibitionism.

In each of these pairings, Avedon is presented as a strong masculine figure looking on vibrant feminine bodies. But, in each case, the presumed object on which his look is directed, and the power implied by his look, is also undermined by attributes of his own visibility. In these cases, the visual narrative of Avedon’s power is further distorted by the complicity of the idealized femininities that he photographs.

Although Avedon’s preferred camera for nearly 40 years was an 8 10 Deardorff view camera (Hambourg and Fineman, 2002), an imposing piece of equipment that demands much of its user, and which produces large sheet negatives of uncommonly high resolution, Avedon was also an aficionado of automatic photo booths. When teaching workshops, Avedon’s first assignment for other photographers was typically the creation of a photomat self-portrait (cited in Livingston, 1992).

Photomat cameras are photographic vending machines. At these coin-, cash-, and now cardoperated devices, one can pay a small fee, sit in a booth, and receive a set of automatically created portraits. Photomats typically provide a strip of four small exposures, typically sized appropriately for use as passport photos.

As objects of analysis in a philosophical encounter with photography, photomats are interesting for the way in which they normalize the experience of sitting for a portrait (everyone who sits for a photomat is treated using the exact same lighting and compositional approach) and for the way that they undermine a conventional understanding of photographic agency.

Triggering the shutter at a regular interval of time and without thought of intersubjectivity, ethics, or aesthetics, the photomats require us to reconceive portraiture as a performance on the part of the person or people in front of the lens. Their effect is to subvert or deconstruct the relationship between the photographer and the photographed, to break down the dualism of subject and object and to call into question the hard distinction of self and other within the domain of photography.

Avedon’s 1965 photomat portrait shows the head and shoulders of a relatively young man gazing past the optical point that defines the scopic

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viewing position of the camera. A curtain appears in the background, probably one of the drapes that typically covers the doors of photomat devices, and which provide privacy for the sitter as the four exposures are made. For purposes of archiving and reproduction, Avedon made a high-quality copy negative of the photomat print, enabling him to make duplicate prints with great control of exposure and contrast.

This self-portrait is paired with a photograph of an African American woman made on a Harlem street in 1949. The woman appraises the photographer directly as she walks by and obviously submits herself to the making of Avedon’s photograph. Also visible in the frame is an African American man, turned away on the left margin of the image. The background of the photograph depicts a Harlem streetscape, including an apartment building, a first-floor beauty supply shop, a set of windows, and an array of fire escapes that signify an urban setting.

Also in the background, a car is parked on the street, a man stands by its rear fender, and commercial signs are posted on the walls of the building.

Taken on its own, the photograph of the black woman presents an example of Avedon’s management of intricate networks of gazes and looks within photographic space, and should be considered in the same theoretical framework sketched out by Kaja Silverman in her Lacanian reading of Avedon’s 1947 Dior fashion photograph (1994). What is ultimately most important about the African American woman is not that she is black or feminine or exemplary of the reality of Harlem, but that she looks at Avedon, and in a split second calculation decides that she will engage in a kind of collaboration with Avedon. In that moment, she not only sees Avedon, but understands him, and that understanding provides the power that gives her strength in the camera’s capacity to represent her.

But the linkage of this photograph with Avedon’s photomat self-portrait is also fully implicated in a discourse on race and a philosophy of absolutes, a discourse that is formed by an Avedonian assertion of similarity between himself and the anonymous black woman.

The claim of similarity is founded on a purely photographic consideration: the tonal range of the two photographs. In each photograph, Avedon imposes blackness and whiteness on both

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himself and the African American woman. He executes this symbolic metamorphosis via his deployment of near-total photographic black (Zone 1 in the Adams Zone System for exposing and printing photographs) and near-total photographic white (Zone 9). Both faces are presented such that they have the same highlight tonal value, effectively imposing whiteness on a black woman. The shadows of both faces are also shaded such that they are ringed by the same near-black tonal value, here imposing blackness on a white man.

black and photographic white, and therefore between embodied black and embodied white, and therefore between a philosophically totalizing black and a philosophically totalizing white.

I believe that Avedon is striving to deal with two philosophical matters through his juxtaposition of these two images, and his reproduction of them with such a closely matching contrast. The first involves Avedon’s interrogation of matters of subjectivity and objectivity in a visual field, his consideration of the relationship of the gaze and the look, and his blurring or denial of conventional notions of the ontological separation of a photographer and the photographed. Avedon strives to engage with these concepts via his own theories of self and otherness, especially as expressed via the categories of race and gender difference.

The second philosophical matter with which Avedon engages in his pairing of these two photographs is a critique of the philosophical opposition of black and white. Zone 0 and Zone 10 are conventionally conceived as being black and white, absolute and opposite, the totality of presence of light and color and the totality of their absence. But in actual practice, Zone 0 and Zone 10 both exhibit a textural and a chromatic variation from print to print, and even within the same print.

What Avedon demonstrates by pairing himself with a black woman is the usefulness of this photographic concept as a metaphor illustrating a philosophy of absolutes, and especially of a philosophy of absolutes applied to matters of race. Avedon imposes a conceptual blackness on his own face, through which an essential whiteness blazes through. He also imposes a conceptual whiteness on the Harlem woman, framed by a blackness that we are culturally conditioned to read as more natural, but which I believe Avedon understands as a consequence of a particular approach to photographic technology.

In the end, this photographic proposition reveals a dialectical relationship between photographic Pages 147–161

As juxtaposed with the Harlem photograph, Avedon’s photomat self-portrait shows him looking at a horizon beyond the focal plane of the camera and, by association, beyond the African American woman in the matching portrait. On what could Avedon be looking?

What could exert so much greater interest or scopophilic satisfaction than the otherness of a regal black woman? The answer to that question points to important concepts shared by a number of 20th century philosophies of appearance and visuality: those of the role played by the gaze in the constitution of subjectivity, and also of the gaze as a distinct function from the look.

Avedon’s look-beyond provides a visual metaphor for the Lacanian ontology of the gaze, one that is aware of the gaze’s nonlocalized essence and its separation from the direct functions of the embodied eye (Lacan, 1977).

Also significant about this photograph, as I noted previously, is the sense of complicity conveyed during this photographic proposition.

The woman’s direct regard of the atypically surreptitious Avedon reaffirms the dialectical nature of seeing, and Avedon’s exploration of that ambiguity via photography.

Juxtaposed with the Monroe photograph, Avedon’s white background self-portrait from 1980 depicts an Avedonian confrontation with the photographic apparatus defined by his 8 10 view camera, his assistants, his own body, and the horizon. Categorized in Avedon’s recordkeeping as part of his western project, the photograph shows him waving his hands in a beckoning fashion, a gesture that appears to invite the gaze of an unrepresented other.

Punctuating another moment of resonance with 20th century theories of appearance and visuality (such as Lacan’s), this gesture locates Avedon in a position of otherness, enabling him to gaze on himself.

Avedon’s account of the making of the 1957 Monroe photograph provides two further elements that resonate with its use in this association. According to Avedon, this particular photographic session with Monroe exemplified her adeptness at playing the role of Monroe. The disingenuously sexual personality, the eroticized exhibitionism, and the presence to the camera

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that defined Monroe’s public identity were therefore surface manifestations, according to Avedon, which served to locate her subjectivity as a performance, or a mask. According to Avedon’s narrative of the final photograph of this particular sitting, Monroe presented a new kind of surface for Avedon, stripped of the performance of Monroe, and yet evoking a new and unfamiliar and possibly more authentic Monroe (Hambourg and Fineman, 2002). Also

by Avedon’s account, the photograph was one that required complicity between the photographer and the photographed. Avedon claims that he would not have made this photograph except under the condition that he had an invitation to proceed, even if the invitation was implicit and unspoken (Whitney, 1995).

As juxtaposed with the Seymour photograph, the third Avedon self-portrait of interest in this context shows him holding a shred of a photographic portrait of James Baldwin over his own face. Also made by a photomat device, this last self-portrait, captured in 1964, depicts both Avedon’s direct look at the camera lens, and a look by Baldwin that appears to line up on Seymour’s groin. The print of Baldwin has been torn, and Avedon holds half of Baldwin’s face over his own face, the jagged edge of the print providing an uncertain boundary between Baldwin’s blackness and Avedon’s whiteness. The torn edge provides a further symbolic reference to those psychoanalytic theories that interpret female genitalia as a sign of castration, a lack, or a wound (Freud, 1908).

Consistently with the theories of divided selfhood stated by Baldwin in an essay included in Avedon’s second book of photographs (Nothing Personal, Avedon and Baldwin (1964)), the photograph further conveys the social world of appearance as a mask, separate yet inseparable from a person’s underlying core. As presented by Avedon in this self-portrait, race is both a mask that separates inside from outside, and a staining agent that he symbolically takes on himself.

However, in this case, the word stain could as easily be conceived in its most positive implication (as something that decorates and protects) as in its most negative implication (as something that undermines an essential purity).

Meanwhile, Seymour, a well-known glamour model, exposes her groin for inspection by Avedon, Baldwin, and all the rest of us. For those who experience Seymour’s unveiling via Avedon’s photograph, the moment that she raises

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her hem for the camera is a shocking event, despite a contrary claim by Anne Hollander in her essay accompanying Avedon’s final book, Woman in the Mirror (2005, P. 243). Among other accomplishments, Avedon’s photograph makes Seymour’s pubic hair an unavoidable target of the viewer’s attention.

But unimpeded display in its own right is not necessarily shocking. What makes the gesture most shocking is its familiarity. If we know who Seymour is, and if we know why she is prominent in the context of modern mass culture, then we are also already acquainted with her mediated embodiment. Our familiarity has been conditioned by the photographic deployment of her body in the pages of men’s lifestyle magazines and women’s fashion magazines, in catalogs and television advertisements, and in the celebrity press. Even for those who don’t know of Seymour as an individual, but who are exposed to her style of femininity elsewhere in mass culture, Seymour’s presence in this photograph stands in for the familiar figure of the contemporary glamour model.

In each case, these pairings supersede the meanings conveyed by each single photograph.

Each set interrogates the nature of an embodied and localized look and a disembodied and nonlocalized gaze, using photography as the gaze’s visual metaphor. Is the essence of gazing located in the biological mechanism of vision, or elsewhere? Is the gaze unilaterally imposed, or can it be invited? Is gazing the prerogative of unified, and implicitly masculinized subjectivities, or does it function to undermine the wholeness and plenitude of the gazing subject? These are the questions suggested by the insertion of Avedon’s body into the visible domain of photographic discourse, further elaborated by other instances of Avedonian self-portraiture, and only accessible via an interpretive strategy that accounts for Avedon’s practices of image selection and sequencing.

Conclusion Although I approached this inquiry primarily with the goal of provoking conversation, in line with Gadamer’s principles of interpretation, my encounter with metaphor theory has revealed a possible area of thinness in existing scholarship about sequences of images. For example, a semiotic approach to a set of sequenced images such as Avedon’s certainly seems like an appropriate venture, but other such inquiries into mass-mediated photographs have dealt with the

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anchoring and contextualizing functions of the total package of the mediated text, including captions and other textual supplements, and have not confronted the theoretical ambiguity suggested by the purely photographic sequence (see Barthes (1977) and Williamson (1978), for example). Because it is a sequence, a photographic series functions something like a linguistic discourse, but because it is purely photographic, it also resists analysis in purely linguistic terms.

of photographs might be considered metaphorical remains open for me. This particular account of these particular images relies on the translation of the visual content into language to assert an intelligible metaphor. My finding does not answer the possibility that photographs, or sequences of photographs, can function as metaphors in their native state, without a mandated translation into language. Further investigation into the possibility of purely visual metaphors along the lines proposed by Priimägi remains for the future.

A similar tension between the visual and the verbal nature of the purely photographic sequence complicates the application of metaphor theory to these Avedonian discourses, and perhaps all other purely photographic sequences in the arts and mass media. The photographic sequences under consideration here can be appraised as metaphor in context of at least three levels: as a collection of pictorial metaphors, one per image; as a collection of pictorial metaphors among each image, such that each participating image potentially serves as a metaphor for its partner; or as a metaphor that depends on the unity of two images to reference an associated metaphorical partner, one that resides in the domain of language or knowledge or philosophy.

For the four photographic pairs emphasized in this particular inquiry, I conclude that each can be convincingly interpreted as metaphor according to the terms of this third pattern: Pairings Galanos & Beason Avedon and the Harlem woman Avedon & Monroe Avedon & Seymour

Verbal Translation Man is a fashionable being The photographer is the photographed A portrait is an invitation A photograph is a revelation of a hidden wound

Do these particular cases provide the added benefit of adhering cleanly to Forceville’s criteria for evaluating metaphors? I believe so. Each features two terms (a pair of photographs and an associated narrative or philosophical concept); each proposes that we understand one expression in terms of the other; and each adheres to an implicit hierarchy in which the visible pairings are understood in terms of the nonvisible concepts.

These four interpretations therefore satisfy at least one set of standards for rigorously analyzing pictorial metaphor. However, the question of whether this particular set of interpretations exhausts the possibilities under which sequences Pages 147–161

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References Adams, A. (1981). The negative. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

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Editors Note: Photograph accompanying this article are by Richard Avedon Copyright © The Richard Avedon Foundation

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Erik Palmer completed his PhD at the University of Oregon in 2008 and wrote his dissertation on “Seeing Richard Avedon.” He teaches in the Department of Communication at Portland State University. Send correspondence to: eapalmer@pdx.edu 157

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Figure 2. By pairing a photomat portrait of himself with a street portrait of an African American woman (facing page) in Harlem in the 1940s, Avedon seeks to interrogate the presumed duality of black and white, and proposes photographic tonality as a metaphor for philosophical opposition. The following spreads were taken from the book An Autobiography by Richard Avedon (design by Mary Shanahan, Random House, 1993).

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Figure 3. With his pairing of fashion designer James Galanos and shipping clerk David Beason, Avedon makes a clear claim of similarity between the two men; whether this sequence should be further taken as a visual metaphor depends on the theory of metaphor one chooses to apply.

Figure 4. In addition to connecting the worlds of fashion and politics that Avedon explored photographically, this sequence relies on obvious visual symbols to propose a similarity between fashion model Simone and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

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Figure 5. Avedon’s pairing of a studio self-portrait with his photograph of Marilyn Monroe expresses the metaphoric claim that photography is an invitation, and suggests that the photographic sitter is always an active participant in the making of the portrait.

Figure 6. This pairing of an Avedon self-portrait and a transgressive fashion photograph of glamour model Stephaine Seymour interrogates Avedonian notions of voyeurism and exhibitionism. The imposition of torn photograph of James Baldwin suggests a Lacanian and metaphorical interpretation of this sequence, and proposes photography as the revelation of Lack, or a gaping wound.

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