The New York Times did a great piece covering the Avedon Retrospective which launched yesterday and will continue through the 6th of September at the International Center of Photography.  This exhibition is a long journey through Avedon’s Fashion Photography, documenting his work from 1944 till 2000. According to the article it is the largest survey of Avedon’s fashion work since the Metropolitan Museum show in 1978. Avedon style was so developed in every way, from his interaction with the models to his portrayal them as subjects to the elegant framing;  it was all so Avedon and will be forever! His style has been heavily emulated by many of today’s most highly acclaimed photographers and his legend continues to write itself.

Avedon is credited with the surfacing iconic faces and personalities such as Twiggy. “Despite the hullabaloo she caused, which the writer Thomas Whiteside described in a profile that year in The New Yorker, Twiggy’s career was actually brief. It is Avedon’s pictures that make us think of her as the definitive ’60s child.”

This is a must see exhibit for all fashion and photography lovers. The photos I have chosen are just a select from the video retrospective you can see online at the New York Times. It gives a well narrated history of Avedon’s fashion career.

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Guy Bourdin was born in Paris on the 2nd of December 1928. His father was Spanish and his mother Belgium. His parents separated when he was still an infant and his father still only 18. He went to live with his paternal grandparents who had a house in Normandy and a restaurant in Paris named Brasserie Bourdin. His father remarried and Guy moved back with him and his step-siblings. Under the Guise of doing his homework he would sketch on the napkins. There were two telephone booths side by side in the Brasserie Bourdin and every time mother called, his father or stepmother would lock him in one of them so he could speak to her. This made him terribly angry in later life and he would often tell this story. He only saw her once. she came into the restaurant and gave him a present. His abiding memory was of a made-up elegant Parisienne with pale skin and pale red hair. Hence the reason why women with pale skin and red hair haunted his pictures years later.

BOURDIN who died in March of 1991, at the age of sixty-two is, unlike his contemporaries Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, scarcely known to the general public; within the worlds of photography and fashion, however, he is something of a legend. Read the full story