Richard Avedon valuation
Put movement into fashion photography, then put his sitters against white paper with nowhere to hide.
Richard Avedon was born in New York in 1923 and was staff photographer at Harper's Bazaar by his early twenties, later moving to Vogue and then to the New Yorker.
What a work by Richard Avedon is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Richard Avedon was born in New York in 1923 and was staff photographer at Harper's Bazaar by his early twenties, later moving to Vogue and then to the New Yorker. He took fashion photography out of the studio and let it move — models running, laughing, mid-step — and the images of Dovima, Suzy Parker and Twiggy are the ones that changed the trade. The portraits are the other half: sitters photographed against plain white seamless paper in hard even light, cropped tight, printed large. In the American West, made between 1979 and 1984 with drifters, miners and slaughterhouse workers, is the fullest statement of that method. He died on assignment in 2004.
Print size, print date and edition are the whole of the question with an Avedon, because the same negative exists as a modest exhibition print and as a mural print several feet high, in different editions and at different dates. Signature, edition number, copyright stamp and the Richard Avedon Foundation's blind stamp are normally on the verso, and a print separated from those markings is much harder to place. Vintage gelatin silver prints, later prints and posthumous estate prints are three distinct categories.
The books
Avedon's books are collected in their own right. Observations, published in 1959 with commentary by Truman Capote and design by Alexey Brodovitch, and Nothing Personal, published in 1964 with text by his school friend James Baldwin, are the two early landmarks. In the American West, the book of the portraits he made for the Amon Carter Museum, followed in 1985.
First editions with their original slipcases or dust jackets, and copies inscribed by Avedon, are worth considerably more than later printings. Plates removed from the books are reproductions, however fine the printing, and should not be confused with photographic prints carrying the stamps and signature described above.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
