Richard Avedon - Italian Days

Italy through the lens of a master of photography who revolutionized the way of telling faces and stories. Considered one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, Richard Avedon was born in New York in 1923. In the numerous journeys that led him to cross the Italian peninsula several times from 1946 onwards, a country suspended between misery and hope that was still emerging from the Second World War, his gaze rested at length on places and people, attracted by the mix of beauty and devastation, glorious past and uncertain present, pain and resilience.

From the copious material from those years, the Gagosian gallery has chosen around 20 photographs taken on the streets of Rome, Sicily and Venice. Eighteen of them are part of the series Italy (1946-48), presented in its entirety here for the first time, but the exhibition also includes images from a 1946 series portraying Zazi, a Roman street performer. Avedon’s exploratory trips to Italy in the 1940s and 1950s exerted a profound influence on his later practice, infusing every image with an inimitable depth of spirit and range of emotion.

The multiple series of photographs he produced were pivotal in the development of his sophisticated approach to portraiture, as shown by some iconic portraits juxtaposed with shots from his days in Italy. The famous 1957 portrait of Marilyn Monroe and the 1980 image of pawnshop employee Ruby Holden, for instance, both appear to have been anticipated by a Roman street portrait taken in 1947. The downcast gaze that characterizes one of two paired figures of the renowned playwright in Samuel Beckett, writer, Paris, April 13, 1979, for instance, is foreshadowed by the earlier Italy #6, Rome, 1946, in which a young boy puts his hand to his face as he looks down at the sunbaked cobblestones of a metropolitan street.

The exhibition is designed by Cécile Degos, who was also responsible for the design of the 2024 exhibition “Iconic Avedon: A Centennial Celebration of Richard Avedon” at Gagosian Paris.

Photo: Richard Avedon, Italy #10, bellboy, Eden Roc Hotel, Taormina, Sicily, September 1947 © The Richard Avedon Foundation Courtesy Gagosian