15 May 1923 – 1 October 2004, was an American fashion and portrait photographer. Born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, he developed an early interest in photography and later studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research. After military service, he began working professionally in the 1940s, quickly establishing himself within the context of magazine photography.

From 1945 to 1965 he worked as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, and from 1947 also for Vogue, where he became known for a new approach to fashion photography. He moved models out of the studio into everyday environments and introduced a sense of movement and narrative into his images, shaping the visual language of postwar fashion imagery.

Alongside his commercial work, he developed an extensive practice in portraiture. He photographed cultural and political figures as well as anonymous subjects, often using a large-format camera and a plain white background to emphasize expression and physical presence. His projects included documentation of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s and the series In the American West, produced between 1979 and 1984 and later published as a photobook.

He published numerous books, including Observations (1959), Nothing Personal (1964), Portraits (1976), and In the American West (1985). Over a career spanning more than five decades, his work moved between fashion, reportage, and portraiture, and is held in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Reference
Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition. Retrieved April 3, 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Avedon