Ron Howard's 'Avedon' Lands on Netflix: A Fashion Giant, Taken Apart

Ron Howard's documentary Avedon is now streaming on Netflix, and it makes one thing clear: Richard Avedon wasn't a fashion photographer who occasionally did serious work. He was a portraitist of the human condition who happened to start in fashion.

The film builds its case through archival footage and interviews with a heavyweight roster: Larry Gagosian, Tina Brown, Twiggy, Hilton Als, Samira Nasr, Isabella Rossellini, Calvin Klein, Avedon's son John, and James Martin, executive director of the Richard Avedon Foundation. Gagosian, who represents the foundation and just opened an Avedon show in Beverly Hills, recalls a brunch with the photographer that consisted of hard-boiled eggs and champagne. "I thought it was super elegant," Gagosian says.

Where did the white background come from?

Howard traces Avedon's signature device to an unlikely place: World War II. As a staff photographer for the United States Maritime Service in the 1940s, Avedon shot around 100,000 faces on plain white backgrounds for ID cards, using a Rolleiflex camera.

"It's existential white, the only thing you see is the geography of the face," Avedon says in an old interview used in the film. He grew up reading Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Vogue at his father's women's retail business on Fifth Avenue, studying photographers like Martin Munkácsi, Edward Steichen, and Anton Bruehl.

After the war, he studied graphic design and photography at the New School, where he met Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch. Brodovitch sent him to Paris in 1947 under the magazine's mandate of "bringing back the glamor of pre-war Paris." Avedon arrived in time for Christian Dior's New Look — full pleated skirts below mid-calf, an antidote to wartime rationed fabrics. He shot five girls swirling in full-length skirts, lighting each Paris photograph, he said, as though reconstructing a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film.

Not everything passed muster. When he photographed a model crying at a railway station, editor-in-chief Carmel Snow — who coined the term "the New Look" — gave him the verdict: "Nobody cries in a Dior hat, Dick."

What do the famous images and prices tell us?

In 1955, Avedon made one of his most famous pictures, Dovima with elephants. Gagosian reveals in the film that he once sold it for $2 million. By 1957, Avedon was famous on a Picasso scale — he photographed Picasso in 1958 — and had inspired Stanley Donen's film Funny Face, in which Fred Astaire plays an Avedon-like photographer. Avedon shot the stills for that film's opening credits himself.

His shoots for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue lasted four days, with models like Lauren Hutton, Beverly Johnson, and Penelope Tree. That scale, the film argues, belongs to a vanished era of hefty budgets and creative freedom.

What drove the unflattering portraits?

The documentary connects Avedon's drive to expose his subjects to his own imperfect upbringing. Avedon, who died in 2004, says his parents presented an idealized family in scrapbooks and even borrowed a dog as a prop. His sister Louise was his first muse — "beauty affected me," he says — and his models shared her oval face, high cheekbones, and brunette hair. Louise was catatonic, spent more than 15 years in a psychiatric hospital, and died there in 1968 at age 42.

"One of the great themes in his work is alienation and isolation. He wants to know what's going on inside human beings," John Avedon says. The photographer threw himself into work through heartache: when his first wife, actress Doe Avedon, left him, and when his second wife, Evelyn Franklin, fell into depression. "Everything diminishes," Avedon says. "Work does not. It's the one thing that doesn't turn on you."

He didn't flatter. He followed every handler's guideline shooting Nancy Reagan, then focused the final image on her claw-like hands. He told the Duke and Duchess of Windsor that his taxi had run over a dog on the way to the shoot — a lie — and captured the droop in their smiles. Wallis Simpson told him she would destroy him when the photos ran. Avedon, who was Jewish, still described the couple, Nazi sympathizers during the war, as "compassionate."

Beyond fashion, he waited seven weeks in Vietnam to photograph the war's American generals, and turned his lens on residents of the American West and the Chicago 7.

What does the film leave out?

Howard avoids the claims about Avedon's sexuality raised in Avedon: Something Personal by Norma Stevens and Steven M. L. Aronson, and in Michael Gross's Focus, which reports Avedon had an affair with his high school classmate James Baldwin — with whom he made the book Nothing Personal. The foundation vigorously disputed certain episodes in Something Personal but never denied the descriptions of his sexual identity.

The film also skips the moment Avedon stopped working for Vogue, when Anna Wintour replaced Grace Mirabella as editor-in-chief and moved away from his cropped headshot covers.

What's left is a portrait of an era's glamour — and its cost. One image in the film says it plainly: Avedon's 1952 portrait of Charlie Chaplin, two fingers raised to his head like horns. The devil, the film suggests, was in the picture all along.