The beekeeper stood next to his portrait. It was the opening night of In the American West at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1985, and the museum had invited a number of Richard Avedon's sitters to stand beside the pictures that had been made of them in the summers between 1979 and 1984.
In the frame, the man's face and shoulders are covered in bees. Beside it, at the reception, the same man stood in a clean shirt, looking at himself being looked at. The print is monumental, the beekeeper rendered far larger than life. The man himself is not.
That is the whole project, held in one room on one night. Avedon spent the summers of 1979 to 1984 traveling to 189 towns across the West and up into Canada, conducting 752 sittings and exposing 17,000 sheets of film through a large-format camera. The commission had come in 1979 from the Carter's director, Mitchell A. Wilder, who asked the preeminent fashion and portrait photographer of his generation to make a portrait of the American West.
The Carter's gamble was institutional as well as artistic. A regional museum of American art hired a New York fashion photographer to define the West, and then let him do it his way, in the summers, over years. Laura Wilson, a young Texan hired as Avedon's assistant, photographed the making of the work: the paper going up in hard light, the sitters waiting, the large camera on its tripod in places no large camera had any business being. Her pictures are the project's shadow archive, the labor behind the seamless. Avedon photographed miners, drifters, ranch hands, waitresses, teenagers, oil field workers. He placed every one of them against the same blank white background: the seamless paper of the fashion studio, unrolled in parking lots, fairgrounds, and rodeo grounds across the West.
The white background is the entire moral event. In a fashion studio, the seamless is a flattering device. It removes distraction so the clothes, the face, the constructed fantasy can hold the frame. Transplanted into documentary territory, the same paper does something harder to forgive. It strips away every trace of place, every marker of context, every alibi. The sitter stands in nothing, and the nothing is the point.
Avedon understood this better than his critics have ever quite allowed. Each portrait in the book is titled the way a document is titled: name, location, date, and often occupation. Sandra Bennett, twelve year old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, August 23, 1980. The paper erases the town. The caption puts it back. The backdrop refuses context; the caption restores it, in the driest possible language, as if to say: the erasure was a decision, and here is what was erased.
Note what the sitters wear. Avedon photographed working people in their work clothes: the miner's gear, the waitress's uniform, the teenager's ordinary shirt. The paper does not clean them up. That is the difference between this backdrop and the fashion seamless it descends from. In fashion, the white paper flatters by removing the world. Here it removes the world and leaves the work clothes, so the erasure and the evidence sit in the same frame. The book's sequencing holds that tension with the deliberation of an editorial spread, the captions doing the documentary labor the paper refuses.
The charge against the project has never gone quiet, and it should not. In the American West has been criticized, since its first showing, for voyeurism, for exploiting its subjects, for inviting the audience to feel condescension dressed up as attention. The question has always centered on the paper itself: whether removing these people from their context and placing them before a fashion photographer's lens turned working people into objects for elite consumption.
That was an essay in the Journal of the Southern Regional Council, in 1987, and it remains the single sentence the project has never fully answered. It does not need to answer it. The sentence is inside the work already. Every portrait in In the American West is a person standing rootless against seamless white paper, and the alienation the essay names is not a failure of the portraits. It is their subject.
Here is the verdict, stated plainly. The white backdrop is honest because it declares the removal. Conventional documentary photography keeps the setting and pretends the camera is neutral; the viewer is invited to forget that someone chose the frame, chose the moment, chose what to include. Avedon removes the setting and pretends nothing. The violence of the erasure is legible in every image. You watch the removal happen, and you are left to decide what you owe a person standing in nothing.
That is why the fashion connection matters, and why it is not a footnote. Only a fashion photographer could have made this project, because the white background is a fashion instrument and Avedon knew exactly what it does to a body: how it isolates, how it insists, how it refuses the subject any help from the surroundings. In a fashion sitting, that instrument serves the garment. Here it serves no garment. The portrait sells nothing, which leaves the sitter with nowhere to hide and the viewer with no transaction to complete. You cannot buy what is on offer. You can only look.
It cuts the other way, too. The backdrop stripped Avedon of his own machinery. No styling, no art direction, no set, no retoucher's rescue. The most controlled fashion photographer of the century, working with the simplest instrument he owned, stood or fell on whether the person survived the paper. In the strongest of the 752 sittings, the person survives it. Sandra Bennett survives it. The teenagers and the drillers and the waitresses survive it. That survival is the photograph's argument for itself, and it is the only defense the project has ever needed, because it is the only defense the project ever offers.
The book was published in 1985 by Abrams, with a foreword by Avedon and an essay by Laura Wilson, the young Texan who had assisted him on the road and photographed the making of the work. The exhibition opened at the Carter the same year. Forty years later, the series hung at Gagosian in London in an exhibition curated by Avedon's granddaughter, Caroline Avedon, who chose to foreground the children, teenagers, and young adults of the project for an audience her own age. The paper is the same white. The sitters are older or gone. The argument is unfinished.
At the 1985 opening, the beekeeper and the other sitters who came to Fort Worth saw themselves, monumental on a museum wall, titled and dated like specimens and like citizens at once. The portraits had been made in their towns; now their towns were in the captions and the people were on the wall. The exchange the project promised, the trust each sitting required, was being settled in public, in front of the pictures.
That unfinishedness is the project's real achievement. Most portrait series settle, with time, into either celebration or indictment. In the American West refuses to settle. The backdrop keeps doing its work on every new viewer: it erases, it insists, it asks what portraiture owes the people who cannot style themselves for it. The question has no clean answer. Avedon's genius was to build the question into the instrument, so that every sitting asks it again.
