Richard Avedon: New Perspectives in the American West
For this Honors 455 project, I plan on focusing on Avedon’s major work, In the
American West, and comparing many similarities that I have found between Avedon’s
work and Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden. Both acknowledge the raw natural beauty of
their surroundings, yet both creative types focus their energies on capturing the sense of
tragedy and struggle of day-to-day life in the West. In both artists’ works there is a sense
of tragedy as a cycle. For Steinbeck, the cycle is that his characters are repeating the
themes from the Biblical story of Cain and Able, whereas Avedon’s work showcases
poverty/hard labor as a cycle that many of his subjects are struggling to work through.
Both Avedon and Steinbeck also blatantly display hardship in their works, which both
draws people in and causes them to shrink away due to discomfort. One critic of
Steinbeck’s work said that, “There will be many who may be affronted by its brutality or
who will find Steinbeck’s philosophy of life too strong for them. But many of the
classical works of fiction, from ‘Don Quixote’ to Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones,’ aren’t coherent
or artistically graceful”.1
Avedon’s work seems a combination of realistic naturalism and moral optimism.
While he starkly portrays the poverty, pain, and trials of life out west, he also brings a
sense of mischief and energy to his work that seems to make all the melancholy feelings
about the outcome of life a reason to live even more fully than before.2 While people like
Ansel Adams and Edward Weston took great care in photographing only the most
beautiful scenery and nature, Avedon took a different route entirely and worked to shake
up the stereotypes of the American west that society had been building up ever since the
California Gold Rush in the mid-1800’s.
Up until Avedon, most creative work having to do with the west was centered on the
classic idea of the American cowboy; the idea being that even if the hero did run into
trouble, he would still triumph in the end. When discussing his shattering of perceptions
of Westerners, Avedon said, "I'm looking for a new definition of a photographic portrait.
I'm looking for people who are surprising—heartbreaking—or beautiful in a terrifying
way. Beauty that might scare you to death until you acknowledge it as part of yourself."3
For this project I plan on reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Richard Avedon’s In
the American West, and Laura Wilson’s Avedon at Work: In the American West. In
addition to these works I also plan on reading numerous journal articles and various
criticisms of about both Avedon and Steinbeck’s work in order to have a working
foundation of both the pros and cons of their artistic contributions to the view of life out
west.
1
The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, "East of Eden: Contemporary Reviews and
Critical Reception." Accessed September 3, 2013.
http://as.sjsu.edu/steinbeck/teaching_steinbeck/index.jsp?val=teaching_east_of_eden_reception.
2
Gopnik, Adam. 2004. "RICHARD AVEDON." New Yorker 80, no. 30: 64-69. Academic Search
Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed September 3, 2013).
3
Amazon.com, "Avedon at Work: In the American West (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Imprint Series)." Last modified 2004. Accessed September 3, 2013. http://www.amazon.com/AvedonWork-American-Humanities-Research/dp/0292701934/ref=pd_sim_b_1.