The photographs of this series were captured outside the studio, placing his models on a white background, which the photographer attached to any building or to the side of a bus that was available. However it leaves us face to face with ordinary people: miners, oil well workers, convicts, house wives, vagrants, trailer drivers, farmers, waitresses, secretaries. The series “In the American West”, demystifies the American West as the promised land of pioneers and conquerors, as Marta Gili point out, director of the Jeu de Paume. As the work progressed, the portraits themselves began to reveal connections of all kinds -psychological, sociological, physical, and familial- among people who he had never met”. The structure of the project was clear to me almost from the start and each new portrait had to find its place in that structure. The photographer wrote about it: “Beginning in the spring of 1979 I spent the summer traveling in the West, visiting truck stops, stockyards, walking through the crowds at a fair, looking for faces I wanted to photograph. The exhibition presents 40 impressions in large format of the series “In the American West”, produced between 19, made by request of the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas.

He reported the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, old slaves, pacifist marches, and patients from psychiatric hospitals victims of the napalm in Vietnam.

He worked also as a press photographer to the service of the social causes and political events, which arouse the sleepy conscience of the American society of the 60’s and 70’s. His photographic job did not depend or was subject to the volatile fashion world. Avedon printed a decisive change in such genre, where the models loose the statuary aspect and go out to the streets to be photographed in night clubs, shops and coffee shops.

Avedon portrait