A huge retrospective of the works of New York photographer Richard Avedon, the man responsible for revolutionising fashion photography, has opened in Milan.
Around 250 images on show at Forma trace Avedon's career from his beginnings in the photographic department of the Merchant Navy taking snaps at autopsies to his final portrait photo of the Icelandic singer Bjork, shot four months before his death, aged 81, on assignment for The New Yorker.
Fashion house Versace is sponsoring the show in tribute to its frequent collaborations with Avedon, who Donatella Versace described at the exhibition's inauguration as a ''maniac for detail''.
''He would take photographs like a madman for days only to throw everything away and start again,'' said Versace. ''To me those photographs had been wonderful, but he was humble enough to push himself to superhuman efforts to get the result he wanted.'' On show are photos from Avedon's career as a fashion photographer, which began at Harper's Bazaar and saw him transform the genre by allowing models to appear as real, living people rather than just as clothes horses.
The famous shot of supermodel Dovima posing alongside two huge circus elephants in a Dior evening dress at the Paris Cirque D'Hiver in 1955 is on display here.
The exhibition also revisits Avedon's dark, emotionally charged portraits, including a snap of a melancholy Marilyn Monroe caught unaware while waiting for the camera and looking bored.
Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, Truman Capote, Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Beatles are among the other portraits on show here by the man who claimed to have photographed ''just about everyone in the world''.
But also on show are examples of his lesser-known reportage work, with photos of street children taken in Rome and Sicily immediately after the end of World War Two as well as snaps from New Year's Eve 1989 at the Brandenburg Gate just two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In a corner of the exhibition are five more personal portrait images documenting the long illness and death of his father.
After the Italian stop, the show will move on to Jeu de Paume in Paris, followed by Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the FOAM Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam and SFMOMA in San Francisco.
Richard Avedon - Photographs 1946-2004 runs at Forma in Milan until June 8.
