Avedon Is a Gracefully Constructed Documentary About a Great American Photographer

Though he would always love the theatricality of fashion photography, he also made pictures that functioned as social protest. In 1939 African American opera singer Marian Anderson had been barred from singing in Washington's Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who cited a white-performers-only policy. It was an outrage that had long troubled Avedon. In 1963 he had the chance to photograph members of the DAR at a convention, showing a group of women in dowdy gowns, smug with self-certainty; one of them, caught off-guard, actually has her back to the camera. It can't be the kind of portrait any of them were hoping for.