AVEDON
Avedon: Ron Howard explores the career of the photographic genius
For the second year running, Ron Howard is at Cannes with a documentary, following Jim Henson: Idea Man (2024) in Cannes Classics, the director of Apollo 13 (1995) and A Beautiful Mind (2001) presents Avedon as a Special Screening. A portrait of photographer Richard Avedon, a dual figure of twentieth-century America: fashion artist and political witness, studio man and field photographer. Interview.
Avedon shifted from fashion to civil rights photography, from Harper’s Bazaar to the American West, without ever seeming to contradict himself. Did you identify a through-line that holds all these shifts together?
The through-line was Avedon himself — his sensibility, his aesthetic and his commitment to subverting expectations and surprising his audience with the images he captured and shared.
You’ve worked across very different genres throughout your career. Did making this film change the way you think about your own range?
I never wish to intentionally put a recognizable stamp on the projects I direct. It’s always my hope to discover the approach that can best realize the potential I see in the screenplay I’m staging, shooting and editing, regardless if it looks or sounds like other work of mine. For me that is part of the excitement: to step outside my own sensibilities and convey the emotional logic that drives characters to do the things they do, whether in a work of fiction or a movie inspired by real events.
How do you make a documentary about a photographer who constantly reinvented his visual language, without flattening that movement?
It was my aim to celebrate Richard Avedon’s creative journey so, in fact, the shifts in direction, whether stylistic or thematic, were many of the key turning points in the story as I saw it. Very intentionally I underlined those reinventions.
The archive is enormous. What was your selection process?
Every image was innately cinematic because Avedon had an ability to capture moments that suggested scenes in the subject’s life or the character that subject was presenting. The photo selection process was agonizing but incredible. Based on the impressive, impactful images alone, this could have been an epic miniseries so I leaned heavily on pictures that suggested something specific and personal about Avedon as an artist.
What did Avedon’s collaborators tell you about working with him that the photographs themselves couldn’t say?
How exhausting his work ethic was to keep up with, and how exacting his eye for detail could be. He was truly an artistic visionary and perfectionist.
What drew you personally to Avedon : had you ever crossed paths with him?
I never crossed paths with him and of course I envied those who did. Making the film really made me wish I had known him. I would have liked Richard Avedon! I was drawn to his creative energy, endurance and courageous commitment to excellence. And that he so meaningfully used his art form to move the cultural needle.
