Sneaky pictures

Here are a few more pictures I shot of Richard Avedon's work.


Brigitte Bardot, 1959

'Brigitte Bardot was the French film star who achieved the greatest national and international acclaim in the late 50s and beyond, from the moment she shot to stardom in Roger Vadim's Et Dieu Créa La Femme in 1956. Her look -- the distinctive sensual pout, big pale blonde hair and dark-rimmed eyes -- rapidly came to define an era.

Richard Avedon perfectly captured her very particular seductive appeal in this study made in Paris in January 1959. Avedon's exposure gives the image a shimmer of movement, while his high key print bleaches her skin to throw her features into even greater prominence. It is hardly surprising that this stylised and striking portrait, with its abstracted emphasis on the iconography of her look, should be the one selected some years later by Andy Warhol as the basis for his silkscreen portraits of Bardot. In appropriating Avedon's original image, Warhol -- ever sensitive to the qualities that make a photograph peculiarly compelling -- paid the photographer the most precious of compliments. '
-source of text: christies.com-


- Andy Warhol, august 1969 -

In June 1968, Valerie Solanas, a peripheral member of The Factory and a militant feminist, shot Andy Warhol. Solanas was purportedly upset that Warhol had reneged on a promise to film a play she had written. After five hours in surgery, the bullets were removed and the doctors repaired as much of the damage as possible. Upon recovering, Warhol asked his friend Richard Avedon to photograph his scarred abdomen. Solanas eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of first-degree assault and spent three years in prison.
Source of this text: liveauctioneers.com

All taken (SNEAKILY) at his exposition: 'Avedon, Photographs 1946-2004’ at FOAM museum, Amsterdam