Annie Proulx, author of “Brokeback Mountain”, drops a gorgeous review of Richard Avedon’s newly reissued (in the UK) photographic tome In the American West. And who better to review it when that region’s cast of characters are being so thoroughly re-examined this December? Even in this simple review, Proulx’s prose on Avedon’s subjects (“drifters with weatherbeaten faces like cracked mud, people with tiny heads and big tits, acne, moles, freckles, a salesman and a gravedigger, blood-spattered slaughterhouse workers, a fat pre-teen with his rifle”) is eloquent and unflinching:
“Even now the Rocky Mountain western states see themselves as movie locales populated by handsome cowboys, noble ranchers and brave pioneer women living out lofty family and Christian values. These touchy people did not see the stern beauty in the portraits. They did see the dirt and unsmiling faces. Avedon’s work was called vicious, sick, sensational, cruel, by people who did not understand anything beyond photography than that it was representational. They did not get it that they were seeing Avedon’s observations rather than likenesses, art rather than tourism photos.”
And at the end of the short review she sends up a signal flare that says as much about the upcoming release of Brokeback as Avedon’s portrait book:
“Flames of resentment flare when the region is portrayed as anything but down-home, clean, decent, pioneer-spirited whatever. As one elderly rancher put it a few years ago, ‘reality has never been much use out here’.”
After the Gold Rush [guardian]
