![]() ![]() All three, then, started taking pictures during the 1930's, the decade that photographic images first truly saturated the world - it was the decade of Life and its many European predecessors and counterparts. Newton, born Helmut Neust* dter in Berlin in 1920, and Avedon, born in 1923 in New York City, both decided on photographic careers when they were adolescents. Cartier-Bresson, born in 1908 in France and trained as a painter, started taking pictures almost by happenstance - he bought a secondhand camera while traveling in Africa in 1931. If they had not also coincided with so many other great photographers, they might have constituted a golden age all by themselves. ![]() As unalike as three photographers could be, they nevertheless all worked for magazines, overlapping in the public eye for at least a couple of decades thus they unintentionally collaborated to enlarge the public sense of what photography could do. Someday it may seem unbelievable that Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton coincided historically: three major photographers, each highly influential, each with a style as distinct as a fingerprint. There is an erotic component to some of these pictures, but he seems less concerned with men's arousal than with the subtle cues women take from one another, a view that places sexuality in a larger constellation of human qualities. At first, Avedon practiced taking fashion pictures of his beautiful younger sister, Louise, and throughout ''Woman in the Mirror'' (Abrams), a new collection of Avedon's pictures, that respectful posture turns all women into the potential sister - an undeniably beautiful, but deeply kindred spirit. From the models in his fashion tableaux to his later, unembellished portraits of artists, writers, intellectuals, socialites and hardscrabble workers in the American West, his regard for the fully realized individual remained constant. For nearly half a century, taking photographs for the top two fashion magazines in the world, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, women were the subject and the target of his insistent, yet sympathetic gaze. ![]()
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