which they have been paid to model and which he has been paid to photograph). In the 1960s and ’70s, according to Diane Arbus’ biographer, Patricia Bosworth, ‘everybody who entered Avedon’s studio was some kind of star’. Thereafter, even if you weren’t famous when you went in, you sort of were when you came out. Either way, a portrait of oneself by Avedon was a highly personalised status symbol. OK, he might make your face look, as Les Dawson said of his mother-in-law, ‘like a bag of spanners’, but the photograph had the quality of – in fact was a record of – election. To be photographed by Avedon thus afforded a double means of recognition. Consequently people turned up for their session as if for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, almost, as the saying goes, for a rendezvous with destiny.
Again this connects Avedon with nineteenth-century photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron (with whom he felt a special affinity). Back then, according to Benjamin, everything about the elaborate procedure of having one’s picture taken ‘caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying on past it; during the considerable period of the exposure the subject as it were grew into the picture’. In these pictures, ‘the very creases in people’s clothes have an air of permanence’. Avedon, of course, worked with split-second exposure times but the results were in some ways even more striking: the creases in people’s faces have an air of geological permanence. There is the sense, often, of a massive extent of time being compressed into the moment the picture was taken. ‘Lately,’ he said in 1970, ‘I’ve become interested in the passage of time within a photograph.’ So, in one of his most famous portraits, Isak Dinesen looks like she was once the most beautiful woman in the world – about two thousand years ago.
It’s a picture which makes one think of the Sybil who asked for immortality while forgetting to ask for eternal youth. For his part Avedon wondered if people came to him in the same way they might go to a fortune-teller. (He was not alone in this: André Breton, Bill Brandt and Diane Arbus also believed the photographer should attempt to conjure a likeness which, in Brandt’s words, ‘physically and morally predicts the subject’s entire future’.) If that’s the case then Avedon’s prophecies are self-fulfilling and self-revealing. Character is fate. Or maybe that should read character is face. George Orwell famously claimed that by a certain age everyone gets the face they deserve; Martin Amis updated this: nowadays everyone gets the face they can afford. In America this might seem like a quaintly British distinction: you deserve what you can afford; as far as Avedon was concerned everyone’s face got photographed the same way regardless (we’ll return to that word shortly). Fame, face and fate were – give or take a consonant – synonyms. It was a credo that kept faith, simultaneously, with the hierarchy of glamour and the levelling gaze of biological destiny. Looking at his photographs we have the distinct sense that what is being uniquely revealed is, as Milan Kundera puts it in Immortality, ‘the non-individuality, the impersonality of a face’:
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither the character nor the soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.
Hence the impossible contradiction whereby the devastating pictures in which Avedon’s dying father seems to be dissolving into – or being reclaimed by – the white radiance of the backdrop show, according to his son, ‘what it is to be any one of us’.
It was inevitable that, despite his undimmed energy and enthusiasm, Avedon succumbed to a kind of rote. In his last years, as photographer for The New Yorker, he sometimes seemed to be running on empty. He never lost the appetite for discovery but he kept discovering the same thing. The photographer who wished he ‘just could work with [his] eyes alone’ was so highly regarded that he was able, in a quite literal sense, to carry on regard-less. Even so, when he died, the huge swathe of his work, the sheer number of specimens he had scrutinised over time, suggested that it was not just an individual who had passed away. An era came to an end, too, the era when – at the risk of being tautologous – it was possible to be photographed by Avedon. At that moment the means of recognition were altered and diminished, permanently.
2007
In 1997 Horst Faas and Tim Page published Requiem, a homage to the 135 photographers who died while covering the wars in Indochina and Vietnam. The work of Larry Burrows, who photographed the war in Vietnam from 1962 until he died in a helicopter shot down on the border with Laos in 1971, was central to that undertaking. Vietnam, a more extensive selection of his work, enables us to see his achievement more extensively and to define it more clearly.
Burrows was born in London in 1926. He left school at sixteen and got a job in Life magazine’s London bureau, where he printed thousands of pictures by Robert Capa and others. It would be hard to exaggerate the effect of this apprenticeship on his subsequent career. Capa practically invented the genre of combat photography and defined the standards by which it would be judged. If your pictures aren’t good enough, he was fond of saying, that’s because you’re not close enough. Burrows took Capa at his word. In Vietnam a colleague decided that Burrows was either the bravest man in the world or the most short-sighted. Tales of that myopic bravery are legion, and Burrows himself thought ‘the best thing that happens … is when someone turns around and says, “Well, you’ve taken your chances with the rest of us.”’ Like other photographers in Vietnam Burrows fell into the habit of edging right up to death, but whereas Page and Sean Flynn (son of Errol) were swash-buckling, wild, stoned, Burrows was distinguished by his patience and meticulous calm. It is possible to detect these qualities in the formal elegance of the work. While Capa said he would ‘rather have a strong image that is technically bad than vice-versa’, Burrows was obsessed with making strong, technically perfect images. Looking at his best photos reminds me of some documentary footage I once saw of men coming suddenly under fire in Bosnia. Everyone hit the dirt. It took a while to take in what was so strange and unnerving about this footage. Then I realised that the camera recording it all had remained absolutely steady.
This unflinching quality is seen to dramatic effect in a black-and-white photo-essay published in Life in April 1963. Burrows was photographing a Marine helicopter squadron, focusing on James Farley, a fresh-faced twenty-one-year-old gunner. In the course of what was expected to be a routine mission the squad comes under heavy fire. One of the helicopters goes down and Farley’s chopper lands nearby, attempting to rescue the crew. By the time they are airborne again two badly wounded men are sprawled on the floor of the helicopter. One of them dies. The resulting photos have all the cramped panic and horror of Snowdon’s death in Catch-22. But what makes them into a perfect story is the shot of Farley back at base, sobbing, aged by more than a decade in the course of a dozen photographs.
That was the luxury of working for Life: an absence of deadlines and the freedom to construct a narrative around photographs rather than taking them to illustrate breaking news. Burrows used these freedoms to similar effect in the colour sequence on Operation Prairie (1966), which culminates in the famous image of the wounded black sergeant apparently reaching towards his white comrade, also wounded. On the one hand it’s an unadulterated image of the chaos, mud and blood of the aftermath of combat. But it is also a classic Life-like image in that it is, simultaneously, a statement of fact (this really happened) and, precisely by virtue of the unimpeachable quality of its evidence, an illustration of a larger truth (in this case the equality of suffering and tenderness between races) which might not be true at all. What we have, in other words, is a vivid example of the camera’s unique capability: not the creation of a myth but its depiction.
It would be a mistake, therefore, to see images like this as proof of the photographer’s anti-war stance. At that time, in fact, Burrows
