Richard Avedon

In August 2007 Denmark's renowned Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presented Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946–2004, the first major retrospective devoted to Avedon's work since his death in 2004. This beautifully produced catalogue, designed by the renowned Danish graphic designer Michael Jensen, features deluxe tritone printing and varnish on premium paper. It includes 125 reproductions of Avedon's greatest work from the entire range of his oeuvre—including fashion photographs, reportage and portraits—and spans from his early Italian subjects of the 1940s to his 2004 portrait of the Icelandic pop star Björk. It also features a small number of color images, including what must be one of the most famous photographic portraits of the twentieth century, "Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent" (1981). Texts by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Judith Thurman, Geoff Dyer, Christoph Ribbat, Rune Gade and curator Helle Crenzien offer a sophisticated and thorough composite view of Avedon's career.

This major new monograph stands as an important rediscovery of a small but central body of work in the career of one of the world's best known and beloved photographers. The Richard Avedon images presented here, many for the first time, were made in Paris for Harper's Bazaar during the 1950s. What is particularly special about this presentation is that the images are being reproduced to the exact scale of the engraver's prints made for Avedon by the master printer Andre Gremola, and are uncropped, on their original mounts, with all of the artist's notations on both front and back. Thus, they provide a remarkable portrait of the working methods of one of the most influential fashion photographers in history. This oversized book, measuring 12 x15 inches, is being printed without compromise with tritone plates throughout, and will be a stunning object in its own right. With this body of work, which includes the photographer's iconographic Dovima with Elephants, Cirque d'Hiver, 1955, Avedon broke radical new ground in the history of photography. He documented the moment in which postwar France was striving through fashion to reclaim its cultural eminence. Judith Thurman, fashion writer for The New Yorker contributes the book's introduction.