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"Avedon's Endgame"
By Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman
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When Avedon was ten he became obsessed with the idea of photographing Sergei Rachmaninoff, who lived in the apartment above his grandparents on Manhattan's Riverside Drive. After staking out the lobby with his Kodak Box Brownie, he managed to capture the composer standing next to a fire hydrant on West End Avenue. "I wanted him to see me, to recognize me somehow," Avedon told a French journalist years later. "I wanted him to give me something of himself that I could keep, something private and permanent that would connect me to him." The picture, now lost, of this heroic figure in the Russian Jewish firmament of New York was the first in Avedon's private pantheon. Autograph collecting, a long-lived and passionate hobby springing from the same desire, led the teenaged Avedon to gather an idiosyncratic constellation of stars. His album, studded with the signatures of writers, vaudeville comedians, classical musicians, and puppeteers, had a special section devoted to "Great Jews and Great Judges." Also lost, it was a concerted attempt to make a "collection of like-minded people," a first stab at an idea that in some sense has remained with him for life as he seeks out subjects for his camera.
Essay from the exhibition publication, Richard Avedon: Portraits (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2002), available in the online Met Store
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