Into the Land of Our Dreams

By Richard Lacayo

The Western states are to Americans what America so often is to the rest of the world, a myth-encrusted land of possibilities. Considered by the imagination, the plains of Texas and the deserts of Utah invite dreams of a footloose future. They promise a fugitive's paradise: not Arcadia, but a clean slate. The dreams are fed by novels and movies and by the bromides of Sunbelt boosterism. They are also prompted by more than a century of Western landscape photography, from the 19th century panoramas of William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins to the raptures of Ansel Adams. Such sources fed the fantasy of the West as a sublime hermitage, an unpeopled vista where the black comedies of human affairs have yet to intrude.

This is the imaginary tract that Richard Avedon has now populated. Over a five-year period, at the behest of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Avedon took hundreds of portraits throughout the West. Using an eight-by-ten view camera on a tripod, he photographed people at rodeos in Montana, oil fields in Oklahoma and a "rattlesnake roundup" in Texas. He picked more than 100 of those shots for a traveling exhibition titled "In the American West," which began at the Amon Carter earlier this year and has now opened at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. A condensed version of 44 pictures is also on view at the Pace and Pace/MacGill galleries in New York City. (Over the next two years, the show will proceed to San Francisco, Chicago, Phoenix, Boston and Atlanta.)

Many of the people in these pictures do hard physical labor, working in mines, on ranches and in slaughterhouses. Some have tumbled into the abyss: prisoners, mental patients or that hapless segment that Avedon labels simply as "drifter." All of them, from secretaries to millworkers, live in a very different West from the pristine territories of the landscape photographers. Theirs is a place of trials and disappointments, and their faces specify every cent of the cost.

Avedon's emotional scale is weighted decisively on the darker end. There are shots of redoubtable-looking ranchers and honey-faced teens, but almost no one ventures a smile. Far more typical is a picture of a vulpine carnival worker with a chilling gaze. A Texas factory worker, wearing a birthday corsage of dollars, even looks as if she knows that she will end up on a museum wall as an emblem for the empty promises of the working life. In case we miss the point, Avedon throws in three bloody head shots of slaughtered % steers and sheep--a few notes of medieval fatalism, played country-and-western style.

This layer of society is relatively new to Avedon's camera, which is more commonly trained upon Nastassja Kinski's pout and Brooke Shields' rump. He has spent more than three decades at the pinnacle of fashion photography. But at the same time, he has perfected a mordant style of portraiture that mocks the earthly vanity his fashion shots glorify. The fixtures of that style are familiar: unsmiling figures shot in sharp focus against a plain white background. (Avedon started his career taking identity-card shots for the Merchant Marine.) The results can be pitiless. With every wrinkle and sag set out in high relief, even the mightiest plutocrat seems just one more dwindling mortal.

Avedon's ambition is to be, like Goya, both the royal chronicler and the social critic. But unflattering shots of the glamorous and privileged are one thing. How to cast that incinerating gaze upon ordinary people? Not one to swaddle his Western subjects in the gentle conventions of "concerned photography," he has persisted in his relentless inspection of bad skin, weak chins and glassy-eyed expressions. He also has resorted in places to cliched potshots, as in one picture of a nine-year-old cradling a gun. Yet he has given most of the people in these pictures ample means to make their own case, and they do.

Above all, he has provided them with magnitude. Nearly all the images in the show are slightly larger than life-size; some are more than 6 ft. high. Avedon has worked in this scale before, notably in the mammoth prints shown at his 1978 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Here size works to spare his subjects from condescension. These are not little cameos of dismay to be viewed at arm's length with the lips pursed. Facing figures of this dimension, hung so that their eyes are at or near eye level, the viewer feels himself to be the object of their scrutiny too. Confronted that way, one does more than take note of their mood. One tries it on, perhaps to discover the unsettled states within oneself.

Hence, "In the American West" is not primarily a social document at all, though at first glance it appears to be. Avedon is not absorbed by the reporter's task of showing how these people look and dress, or with acknowledging the full range of their emotional lives. Instead, against these blank white backgrounds he has projected the shapes of what appears to be his < own dejection, finding in each glum expression the corollary of a private somber mood. Yet the exhibition is also more than a magic-lantern display of the photographer's psychic woes. Looking through the lens of his temperament, he has sighted one more mythical West, this time a place to represent all places where hopes are checked by reality. His worn-out laborers and depleted old people are the pioneers of our own dilemmas. At some point, everyone settles in Avedon's "West."

The paradox of these pictures is that their visual crispness masks the complexity of their message. Avedon's ultrasharp focus seems to promise minute disclosures. His blank backgrounds suggest elemental truthfulness. If this is not a straightforward picture of the West, what could be? But those optical certainties are a tease. Avedon makes that explicit in the foreword to a recently published volume of these pictures (Abrams; $40). "A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture," he writes. "The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about."

One of the most sophisticated of photographers, Avedon would be the last to claim that his pictures are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. He expects no one to believe the glamour-drenched fantasies he constructs for his fashion pictures. But he also knows that in taking a camera out among ordinary people, he raises expectations of more resolute truth telling. Avedon is throwing those expectations back in the viewer's face. Sometimes it takes a fashion photographer to show that "realism" is art's subtlest cosmetic.