1 Two major exhibitions mark the fortieth anniversary of In the American West, Richard Avedon’s monumental project to photograph, in his own words, “the people who nobody looks at” but who “make the world move.” This quote aptly appears above the portraits of a cowboy from Arizona and of a physical therapist from Montana in the beginning of the exhibit Richard Avedon: In the American West at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. Drawing upon reference prints for the book Avedon published as In the American West in 1985, the exhibition at the Fondation translates the production of text not only between languages and cultures but also between the page and gallery display. The second exhibition, Richard Avedon at the Carter, brings together 40 of the original prints commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in 1979, and accordingly focuses not only on the production of the images, but also on the original installation at the museum in 1985 as well as its controversial reception in Fort Worth. These coincidental exhibitions grant audiences a rare opportunity to view Avedon’s pioneering work in its totality, as both book and exhibition. They also invite audiences to consider the fundamentally collaborative processes of creation that may be otherwise occluded by Avedon’s singular stardom.
2 Across its various forms, In the American West was intended as a foil to stereotypical depictions of the West. The project rejects the association of the West with depopulated, romantic vistas; each portrait is taken against a white background and in diffuse, shady lighting. Here, the West is a working landscape, one that is represented only in the faces of its people. Avedon thus assumes the role of the itinerant photographer, echoing a tradition common in the nineteenth-century West. From 1979 until 1984, Avedon and his assistants travelled in the summer across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain states from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border. Laura Wilson, a photographer who documented the project and assisted Avedon, states that Avedon sought “not confirmation of John Ford’s mythical vision of the West but faces that expressed how he felt about the human condition” (Wilson 17). In her own book on the project, Avedon at Work in the American West (2003), Wilson cites a conversation with Avedon in which he declared, “I’m looking for a new definition of a photographic portrait. I’m looking for people who are surprising—heartbreaking—or beautiful in a terrifying way. Beauty that might scare you to death until you acknowledge it as part of yourself” (17). These people ultimately included housewives and ranchers, secretaries and Hutterite girls, crop dusters and truck drivers. This panorama of Western life was captured at a time of great economic instability, marked by the oil crisis, deindustrialization, and Reagan-era neoliberal politics. In the American West gives special weight to the faces of the marginalized, precarious, and overworked, notably miners, oil field workers, prisoners, the unemployed, and the homeless.
3Moving beyond simple retrospective, Richard Avedon at the Carter engages with the changing reception to In the American West since its debut. The exhibition highlights the tensions at play in displaying Avedon’s anti-heroic work in Fort Worth, the city “where the West begins,” and in a museum with extensive collections of canonical western paintings by Charles Marion Russell and Frederic Remington. The museum’s then-director, Mitchell Wilder, cold-called Avedon to invite him to undertake a project related to the people of the great open spaces of the West. Avedon, then at the peak of his career, agreed–but with great reservations (Rohrbach). He made it abundantly clear that he was not interested in glorifying the West (Wilson 14). Six years later, when the life-size portraits were exhibited in the museum, many visitors were offended by the works. In her review of the exhibition published in The Atlantic in 1986, Louise Todd laments that Avedon “has photographed them [his subjects] as heroic, larger-than-life types, but without any real admiration or respect for them as individuals.” In the current exhibition, this quote has been stenciled above one of the most shockingly unique photographs in the series: the portrait of beekeeper Ronald Fischer, whose calm, intent gaze belies the fact that he is covered in a swarm of bees.
4Although it was organized as a last-minute replacement for another exhibition that was unexpectedly cancelled, Richard Avedon at the Carter stands on its own as a productive contribution to previous showings of In the American West, notably the twentieth anniversary exhibition held at the museum in 2005. As the institution that commissioned the project, the Amon Carter holds one of only two full-size sets of the 120 x 94 cm portraits, in addition to the negatives, whose reproduction was forbidden by the artist. In other words, the Amon Carter Museum has exclusive access to the exhibition photographs, which do not travel individually or as a set. This special holding status has further anchored In the American West as a keystone of the museum’s collections, of which curated selections are regularly shown. While the selection of photographs in Richard Avedon at the Carter was circumscribed by another recent showing of some of the 123 portraits (they are required to “rest” for a long period of time after public display for preservation), the images featured in Richard Avedon at the Carter provide a compelling sample, with a special focus placed on miners, adolescent boys, and blue collar manual laborers.
5The strength of Richard Avedon at the Carter is that, rather than simply presenting a selection of photographs, it reveals the working relationship between artists and museums, as well as artists and their assistants and the other artists with whom they collaborate. This emphasis is symbolized by the exhibition space: the portraits surround a central circular area, which is dedicated to the special links established between the museum, Avedon, Wilson, the assistants, the subjects, the public, and In the American West. A display case includes documents pertaining to the subjects, including the bee pheromone dropper used for the Ronald Fischer portrait, photo release forms, letters, and photographs of the 1985 opening at the Amon Carter. Another case is dedicated to the reception of the debut exhibition, featuring press clippings, visitors’ letters, and attendance statistics. Photographs taken by Laura Wilson reveal Avedon’s unique approach to the portrait sessions: at large events such as fairs or rodeos, or at busy work sites, Avedon would observe and select subjects. He would focus the lens of his large view Deardorf camera before abandoning that traditional point of view altogether. Moving directly before the subject but to the side of his camera, Avedon would tell his assistants when to take the photograph, sometimes taking hundreds of shots in a brief sitting. Further behind-the-scenes information is presented in a projected video recording of a 1985 public talk at the Amon Carter Museum by Avedon, Wilson, and Ruedi Hofmann, the artist responsible for the meticulous and incredibly time-consuming printing of the photographs in Avedon’s New York City studio.
6While Richard Avedon at the Carter provides a selective reflection on the exhibition history of In the American West, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Richard Avedon: In the American West comprehensively exhibits the proof prints of the photography book published in 1985. Indeed, this exhibit is the first in Europe to present the complete set of 110 prints included in the book. This curatorial choice is necessarily guided by the availability of photographs and relevant archives—as mentioned above, the life-size photographic prints cannot be borrowed by other institutions, leaving the Fondation with no choice but to work from the significantly smaller book prints.
7In the first section of Richard Avedon: In the American West, the visitor is presented with a small gallery space containing the first 36 photographs that appear in the book. Throughout the exhibition, the photographs are presented in the order in which they appear in the book. As a panel notes, even the intentional blank pages of the book are visually represented in the gallery by blank spaces, with page breaks also represented by a proportionally smaller blank space. Despite this meticulous faithfulness to the book, the exhibition space imposes other viewing logics. For example, the first plates in the book are hidden from view upon entering the room. The first photographs seen by the visitor as they enter the room via a staircase are plates 29-36, which appear directly facing the entrance and on the right-hand wall. Moreover, the room lacks the context offered by Avedon’s Foreword to the book: the visitor is only offered a title. This first room, however, still includes archival material in two display cases, including Avedon’s revision markings on trial prints, a Laura Wilson photograph of Avedon with his subjects, letters from a reader of the book seeking information on one of the models with whom she has developed an obsession, Polaroids of models holding numbered signs, and even the numbered signs themselves. If the visitor enters this room first, as is indicated in the museum plan, they encounter In the American West first as an exhibition, then as a product of the book. This decontextualization is perhaps intended to invite viewers to confront the gazes of the individuals and to pique curiosity regarding the photographic encounter between Avedon and his subjects, a process alluded to by the contents of the display cases. It also reprioritizes the role of the gallery space as the primary mediator of the interaction between the subjects of the portrait and the visitor.
8The second and much larger section is displayed on the second floor of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. While the portraits continue in a line along the walls, the architecture of the room disrupts this simple linearity. The portrait of a boy holding a dead rattlesnake appears alone on a small wall, adding to the singular impact of the already shocking photograph. In addition, the beekeeper’s portrait is displayed on the wall of a small alcove above archival materials related to the photograph’s production. The repeated pairing of archive materials to their respective portraits is a useful addition which conveys the complexities of the photographic process. A similar set-up may have been preferable to the centralized archival space at the Amon Carter exhibition; however, the much larger scale of their photographic prints precludes this sort of juxtaposition. This highlights one of the fundamental problems of presenting In the American West: the power of the photographs as art relies upon a certain emotional impact, especially when viewed at the imposing size of the Carter prints, that is nevertheless easily overshadowed by an overabundance of contextual information. Yet, the exhibitions elect not only to present but to elaborate in depth the contexts and processes of production and presentation, whether in the form of exhibition or book.
9The fortieth anniversary of In the American West justifies these concurrent exhibitions which depict Westerners in a way that, as the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit reminds us in an introductory text panel, is at odds with the “ostentatiously successful images of North America shown in series such as Dallas and Dynasty.” These representations of the glorious West, though enduring (especially in France), are now joined by more recent visions of the (white) American working class produced in the wake of the first, and now the second, Trump presidency. When Trump signed executive orders in April 2025 to “turbocharge coal mining,” dozens of coal industry workers, clad in hard hats and spotless protective gear, appeared behind him in the press photos. In the American West, however, refuses this facile political mise-en-scène. One of the enduring powers of the series is that it subverts what Allan Sekula terms the “public looks”: the grandiose size and exquisite detail of the portraits invites the viewer to “look up” to a heroic superior, while the grime, blemishes, tattered or dirty clothing, and in some cases obvious suffering and fatigue, indicate that the viewer should “look down” upon these “embodiments of the unworthy” (Sekula 10). Avedon, however, proposes that we simply look the subjects straight in the eye.