Richard Avedon
https://www.avedonfoundation.org/

Richard Avedon managed to jump successfully between commercial photography, fashion photography and his ground-breaking fine art portraiture, the breadth and creativity of Avedon’s body of work has made him one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.

Avedon was fresh out of the Merchant Marines in 1944.

When Avedon enlisted, his father, Jack, gave him a Rolleiflex camera as a going-away present, so he applied for a job in the photography department and was assigned to a post in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where he fulfilled his service by taking pictures of events on the base, shipwrecks, and autopsies.

Back in the United States, the country was awash in a wave of prosperity. But in the wake of World War II, a lot of the old mythologies about what to desire and how to live were breaking down.

Around the same period there was a lot of interest in the existentialist writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, and the American Beats like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Nuclear weapons were being developed, the Cold War was brewing, a counterculture was forming, and McCarthyism was in full force.