Richard Avedon, Self Portrait, New York City

Avedon created this self-portrait triptych, created for the Met’s Richard Avedon: Portraits (2002), the last exhibition of his work during his lifetime. It represents the culmination of his mature white-background portrait style, in which the form is stripped down to its bare essentials: full-frame with black borders, no props, no dramatic lighting, nothing for the sitter to lean on or hide behind. In the austere, featureless world of these photographs, the individual stands alone, bathed in a shadowless light that makes no effort to disguise the realities of aging and the simple fact of mortality.



Avedon had experimented previously with multiple-frame portraits of individuals—he created a triptych of composer Igor Stravinsky in 1969 and a diptych of Samuel Beckett in 1979. In his self-portrait, as in those earlier works, the drama unfolds through the changing focus of the subject’s gaze: first downcast and inward-focused, then outwardly directed at the camera. It is this subtle movement from interiority to connection, from the self to the other, that distinguishes the best of Avedon’s portrait work.