In Portraits by Others, a Look That Caught Avedon's Eye
From the website: Avedon believed that portraiture was performance; it wasn't a question of the portrait being natural or unnatural but whether the performance was good or bad. "The point is that you can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface," he wrote in "Richard Avedon: Portraits" (1993). "The surface is all you've got. All you can do is to manipulate that surface — gesture, costume, expression — radically and correctly."
