Avedon
(USA, 104 min.)
Dir. Ron Howard
Prod. Sara Bernstein, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Darcie Reisler, Dallas Brennan Rexer, Justin Wilkes
The images are iconic. Fashion models, movie stars, oil workers, and denizens of Andy Warhol’s factory scene. Often captured in stark black and white, shot with an ungainly, bellowed camera capturing 8”x10” images, Richard Avedon’s photography helped define the 20th century thanks to decades of pushing the boundaries.
Ron Howard’s highly sympathetic portrait of the man is both straightforward and effective, stripping Avedon down to his constituent elements with similar rigour that the photographer’s art reflects. There are a slew of talking-head conversations from collaborators, subjects, and family members alike, as well as vintage interview footage by the central subject that is effectively repurposed in this contemporary telling.
Avedon’s story is wrapped in his iconoclastic attitude towards his own imagery. This is a photographer who found beauty in the flawed, helping transform the staid, often static sights that proceeded his milieu to embrace movement and amplify subtle elements of humanity within the still frames. Most associated with his covers for the leading magazines of the age, his vision was so powerfully embraced that all these years later it simply feels that this is the way this type of photography was always done.
Like Howard’s 2024 film about Jim Henson, there’s a clear appreciation for the subject’s creativity, while still allowing for a more nuanced look at the person behind the camera. Avedon’s complicated relationship with his father and his relationship with his sister, including the role his veneration of her beauty and subsequent feelings of guilt about her eventual breakdown, or even his struggle to maintain marriages, are, of course, quite typical for such films about successful men and those they abandon along the way.
Yet even these elements, superficially commonplace, are presented in ways that embrace the contradictions, refusing to mirror the black and white contrast of the photos and more readily revel in the grey. Avedon’s controlling nature, his use (and, through today’s perspective, abuse) of his assistant’s contributions, and even the way he’d manipulate his subjects, makes for a complex articulation of what it took to get these particular images.
Some of Avedon’s pioneering work is quite revelatory. The story of him being sent to Paris to help resuscitate the garment and craft industries, for example, is fascinating to witness. Howard shows us how the camera both bolstered deeper truths about the beauty of the region, while being equally engaged in complete fabrications, as if there people draped in glamorous gowns traipsed the streets of a bombed-out French capital.
Avedon was well aware of the camera’s ability to lie, and his discussion of borrowed dogs and fake smiles to mask troubling family life shows that even snapshots are overt modes of manipulation. Yet rather than presented as some sort of critique, if anything, it indicates what the very role of such an artist is: the master manipulator taking light, shadow, and circumstance to reveal, often against the overt wishes of the subject, something deeper.
While some of the images that were shocking for their time have been softened through years and familiarity, other photos feel as electric as they did when first printed. There’s a deeply cinematic modality to the way Avedon photographed, and that element elevates Howard’s documentary even further, allowing even still moments to feel as if they are flowing with movement.
Many of Avedon collaborators and colleagues, from Isabella Rossellini, Tina Brown, Twiggy Lawson, Calvin Klein, and Diane Arbus, each provide a differing facet on how they interacted with the sometimes mercurial man. One particularly effective element is the refusal to segregate Avedon’s overtly commercial work from his other photographs, all playing fundamental roles in developing his aesthetic, with the former funding his more avant garde explorations and granting him the economic freedom to pursue his art.
From his collaborations with the likes of James Baldwin, through to his photography of generals during Vietnam and political figures like Reagan, Obama, Kissinger, and Carter, we are witness to the vast breadth of his gaze. Avedon’s negative reaction to criticism is also on display, as is his own vulnerability, which was often hidden. It’s a paradoxical element for a man so clearly unafraid to make others uncomfortable in order to achieve a given image, but the fact remains that despite his seemingly cool air there was much in the way of self-doubt at the core of his personality.
Fashion photography feels inherently ephemeral, a fleeting moment captured only to be replaced by the novel that’s inevitably to proceed. Yet through Avedon’s lens, these moments were not simply frozen in time, but they were captured with the vitality and movement of the moment, transcending the intention of showcasing a given look or style. They instead provide deeper insight into the model, the artistry of the garment’s creation, and the keen eye of the person capturing the photograph. It’s these disparate elements, never one overpowering the other, that grants Howard’s film much of its success, providing a nuanced, detailed, and entirely compelling, yet unabashedly celebratory look at Avedon’s art and the legacy he left behind.
Avedon premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
The post Avedon Review: Ron Howard’s Fashionable Doc Portrait appeared first on POV Magazine.