Ron Howard's 'Avedon' Documentary Hits Netflix After Cannes Premiere

Ron Howard's documentary Avedon reaches Netflix on 11 November after premiering at the Cannes film festival, drawing on hundreds of thousands of negatives from the Richard Avedon Foundation archive. Oscar winner Howard built the film around a photographer who worked for six decades and sat subjects from Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin to civil rights activists and working-class Americans.

The film opens a window onto Avedon's method through the people who watched him work. His former assistant, Sebastian Kim, 52, now an eminent photographer himself, recalls a sitting with the Dalai Lama that lasted only four frames of a 12-frame roll. Avedon had accidentally hit his head on a light held above him, and the Dalai Lama burst into laughter.

"I realised he knew at that moment that something had happened, a mistake had happened: he hit his head and the Dalai Lama lit up," Kim says in the documentary.

How did a high school dropout become fashion's defining photographer?

Avedon was raised in New York City. His father, Jacob Avedon, co-founded a specialty store on Fifth Avenue, lost overnight during the Great Depression. Avedon flunked out of high school despite winning a citywide poetry prize.

"I grew up thinking I was certifiably stupid. I couldn't graduate high school. I flunked everything," Avedon once said.

During the second world war, he joined the Merchant Marine. Assigned to its photographic unit, he took more than 100,000 ID card photos and performed autopsy documentation. The endless faces against white backdrops taught him that no two faces are alike. At the New School's Design Laboratory, Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch gave him his foundational philosophy in two words: "Astonish me."

Commissioned by Harper's Bazaar, Avedon brought theatricality to fashion photography after observing Christian Dior's 1947 The New Look collection. He captured models moving, swirling and laughing across Paris streets, transforming static posing into dynamic visual storytelling.

What did the white backdrop mean?

Avedon's portraits relied on a stark, seamless white paper backdrop bounded by a bold black film border. "It's the existential white. The only thing you see is the geography of the face," he explained. "One of the functions of art is to eliminate in order to make more powerful or stronger what the artist wants to get across."

He compared the effect to breaking a three-day fast with a peach: "I never tasted anything like that peach in my life. Because everything, because of the fast, becomes so precious."

For his 1957 picture of Monroe, Avedon waited through hours of joyful posing until the actor collapsed into quiet exhaustion in a corner. The resulting unguarded portrait is often called Sad Marilyn. He treated models as creative collaborators, not props. "If the girl doesn't feel that she's part of it... that's exactly what you get out of her," he said. Models including Penelope Tree and Lauren Hutton recall in the film that working with him was liberating.

Film producer Dallas Brennan Rexer, 54, said: "He was trying to get into their head and into their soul, in a way, through his photos. It wasn't just that they were pretty and their clothing looked nice."

To break the polished guard of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Avedon claimed his taxi had run over a dog. "He wanted to say something much more pointed and important," Rexer said.

How did commerce fund politics?

Avedon directed television campaigns for Calvin Klein, then channelled the money into politically charged documentary work. In 1963 he reconnected with high school friend James Baldwin; together they published Nothing Personal, combining portraits of civil rights leaders and mental asylum patients with Baldwin's prose.

"Nothing Personal is a phenomenal book. The text that James Baldwin wrote is poetic and beautiful, but it also is so resonant today," Rexer said.

The asylum photographs were personal: Avedon's sister Louise suffered severe mental illness. "I photographed things that frightened me so that I could understand them," he said. A withering review in the New York Review of Books stopped him working for about a year. "I began to question myself as an artist," he admitted.

During the civil rights movement he quietly sent film to SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and processed their footage on the side. The work culminated in In the American West (1979–1984), commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Over five summers he photographed working-class Americans against white paper. "I'm looking for faces which surprise me. I'm looking for a face that will hold the wall," he said.

In 1992, at 69, he became the first staff photographer in the New Yorker's history, hired by editor Tina Brown, producing the controversial Mr and Mrs Comfort fashion portfolio.

What does the archive reveal?

Howard's film had unprecedented access to the foundation's holdings: 16,000 sittings, hundreds of thousands of images, and a cache of casual studio audio tapes from the 1960s and 1970s recorded with collaborators including Marvin Israel and Doon Arbus. "So you could be a fly on the wall," Rexer said.

In a Netflix statement, Howard observed: "Avedon defied the idea that there must be a division between art and commerce, highbrow and lowbrow, beauty and brutality."

Avedon's son, John Avedon, describes the contradiction in the film: "He had a bull-like confidence in himself. At the same time, he was totally insecure. I think he had to be anxious in order to perform."

Avedon died in 2004, aged 81, after a cerebral hemorrhage in San Antonio while shooting a New Yorker project titled Democracy. For Kim, the discipline endures: "I credit him for making me the person that I am. It's the discipline that creates character."