Escudero, the Granadian Grandee of Flamenco, 1955,

1955

"Zavattini’s mouth and Escudero’s eyes, the smile of Marie-Louise Bousquet: they are sermons on bravado," observed Avedon, explaining his interest in the expressive potential of portraiture. Quoted in an essay by Truman Capote that accompanied the artist’s first book of photographs, Observations (1959), Avedon highlighted the very features that would set him apart from his contemporaries and that made him a defining figure in postwar American photography. Fashion photography was the foundation of Avedon’s career, and his pictures of models conveying emotion and in motion were a revolutionary departure from the norm of neutral expressions and static poses. Avedon successfully bridged the worlds of commercial and artistic photography, garnering respect in both realms; he was a driving force behind photography’s emergence as a fine-art form in the 1960s and ’70s.