Baldwin and Avedon

The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out—James Baldwin in Nothing Personal: photographs by Richard Avedon and text by James Baldwin (created 1964, republished by Taschen, 2017).

Baldwin and Avedon were friends in high school in the Bronx. By the end of 1963, Baldwin was a famous writer, Avedon a famous photographer. Kennedy had just been killed, and the civil rights movement was on full blast in the USA. Avedon was making photos of Baldwin on assignment for a magazine when he proposed the idea of a book collaboration. It would be his photos with minimal descriptions, and Baldwin’s text: about the struggle for civil rights, about the USA in that very moment—its absurdities, its racism, its juxtapositions of wealth, privilege, and suffering. (The background for their collaboration is explained and analyzed in another wonderful book, The Way We Live Now, text by Hilton Als with photos by Avedon, Taschen, 2017). 

Late 1963, I was in my first year of college, a poor kid from Appalachia. I didn’t yet know about either Baldwin or Avedon, certainly not about their collaboration on an expensive coffee table book. But now I am so engrossed in their work together that I have nothing else to say for this day but that I drenched myself in these words and photographs. I love Avedon’s observation about family photos: “All of the photographs in our family album  were built on some kind of lie about who we were, and revealed a truth about who we wanted to be” (quoted in Als). 

I come from a gothic Southland of racism, rape, incest, and genteel poverty, and I have always pored over everyone’s family albums, fascinated by the lies family photos tell. So I’m having a great time with these books.

This has a Blip history. I became interested in Mitsuko Uchida when I saw a candid photo Sue Foll made of her on Portobello Road last year. Recently I was listening to every recording she ever made, and I saw that the photos on her website and album covers are by Avedon, who died in 2004. I knew his name, and I had a vague idea of his portraits on white backgrounds and his fashion photography, but I hadn’t studied his work. It came as a great shock to me that he was friends with James Baldwin, “Jimmy” to Avedon. Baldwin is one of my favorite thinkers and writers of all time. So I had to see what they did together, what they did apart, and who wrote about them doing all of it.

P.S. While I'm poring over the books and having a fabulous time, Sue is adventuring and having a very different fabulous time.