Women captured by Avedon, heralded a dramatic revolution for fashion photography as well as for Harper’s Bazaar. For one early critic, the pinnacle of this movement was exemplified by a single shot of Leigh, in which she was seen laughing uncontrollably and flinging her arms around the victor of a French cycling race. The photo caused a stir in the industry since laughing and hugging sports idols were not considered appropriate behaviors for fashion models.
Avedon made sure that his energetic exchanges with the model during the session would elicit the appropriate spontaneous emotions in order to give the impression that his subject was actually involved in the scene being portrayed. Avedon encouraged the models to run, laugh, laugh, and run some more in order to get them interacting with the setting and the storyline of the shoot. He frequently talked steadily to break up the models’ still expressions. The ensuing images never overshadowed the couture she wore, instead establishing a relatable model—what the reviewer had described as “human.”
Roberta Smith noted in her review of these early fashion shots—more than fifty of which were included in the 1978 Avedon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—that Avedon “shows fashion photography at its most powerful, and brings it closest to art, in his early work.” These photos, which were almost all taken in Paris in the seven years between 1948 and 1955, focus on a race of emaciated, extravagantly beautiful women as they navigate the streets, cafés, and casinos of that city, frequently accompanied by gorgeous escorts. The street scenes, in which the ladies sometimes come upon “regular” people (a bicycle, an acrobat), have an odd dissonance since the models’ rigorously belled-out, darting hardness in their Dior abstraction geometric skirts contrasts sharply with quasi-documentary surroundings.
Smith correctly drew attention to the differences between Avedon’s photos’ models and other subjects. But she did not completely investigate that discrepancy, therefore she did not determine how it would probably affect Harper’s Bazaar readers. More importantly, Smith reduced Parisian streets to backgrounds similar to any other that Avedon might have used in his studio or that did not essential reflect Paris, thus pointing up another incongruity between the “sharp” or “rigid” features of the models’ outfits and the portrayal of the city’s spaces. When Avedon went to Paris for the first time in August 1947, he took pictures that complemented the “New Look” styles Dior was introducing. In her essay about Avedon’s tenure at Harper’s Bazaar, Carol Squiers pointed out that the publication had “yet to produce a drawing or a photograph that adequately conveyed what all the fuss was about.”
Avedon took a picture of one of these skirts midtwirl to highlight the complete cut of Dior’s New Look designs and highlight their form. The model in one of these photos was cropped above the waist when it appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in October 1947, highlighting the lavish extravagance of the New Look skirt as it swirls above pavement squares. However, Avedon’s favorite image of the same Dior suit was another one, which he included in several publications and exhibits for the remainder of his career, including his 1978 Paris portfolio.** Crucially, Avedon’s favorite image shows the entire ensemble and places the model in a public area (the Place de la Concorde), where the animated diagonals of at least five other pedestrians have replaced the static shadow of a colonnade.
Three of the other pedestrians are young men in suits who pause in mid-walk to watch the model. In an image released barely a month later, the model sports a full-cut, dark-toned skirt and a black jacket that fits snugly around her waist over a flounce of gathered cloth. The ensemble’s strongly feminine silhouette is emphasized by the repetition of extra fabric, the contrast with the light gray tones of the cityscape, and the representation from behind. The tone and substance of Avedon’s shot rely on the carefully chosen dense urban background, which includes the autos, city buildings, the Parisian cobblestone, the street-corner column used for the colonne Morris poster display, and the roadway.
The Marais, the Seine quai, Montmartre, the Place du Trocadéro, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Elysées, Avenue Montaigne, rue Francois Premier, the Café de Flore, Pont Alexandre III, the Gare du Nord, and the Eiffel Tower are just a few of the strategic locations in central Paris that Avedon brought his models to. A comprehensive inventory of the public areas that Avedon utilized for his photo sessions would encompass almost all of the city’s key arrondissements in addition to a handful of its more remote ones, and it would show a variety of richly symbolic cultural, historical, and classed settings. Although Montparnasse had taken over as the city’s creative center between the two world wars, Montmartre still maintained some of the bohemian vibe that made it famous in the 1880s and 1890s.
The gathering spot for the city on holidays or large-scale public demonstrations is still the Place de la Concorde, the location of Louis XVI’s beheading in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Among Paris’s numerous grands boulevards, the Champs-Elysées is a treasure. Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussmann modernized the city in the middle of the 1800s, creating large, open avenues. Numerous well-known haute couture houses, such as Dior, could be found amidst the upscale stores, car dealerships, and dining establishments along the Champs-Elysées. In her initial postwar report from Paris, Carmel Snow stated that the Café de Flore served as a gathering place for “writers and publishers and poets and philosophers and film people… evening after evening.”