One generous section reproduces the entire layout and sequencing of “The Family”, a special series of 69 portraits Avedon made of America’s “power elite” for a 1976 (America’s bicentennial) issue of Rolling Stone. The book features Avedon’s extended projects on the civil rights debate in the early 1960s the American anti-war movement and the war in Vietnam from 1969-1971 a retrospective homage to the Kennedy family, published in The New Yorker in 1993 and his final photo-essay, “Democracy,” surveying the American state of mind during the politically-fractious time prior to the country’s 2004 presidential election (published posthumously in The New Yorker in 2004). Juxtaposing images of elite government, media, and labor officials with photographs of counterculture activists, writers and artists, and ordinary citizens caught up in national debates, it explores five-decades of politics and power by one of America’s best-known portrait photographers. He photographed the faces of politics throughout his career, and this book brings together his political portraits for the first time. Richard Avedon was amazingly prolific during his 50-plus years as a photographer, jumping from high-fashion shoots to his own brand of civil rights photojournalism and support for yippies and members of the counterculture.
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