The Enduring Global Appeal of The West

This past November I visited an art festival in the Azores. I asked a fellow reporter, an Italian working in Germany, where in the States she’d most like to visit. She had never been.

“Texas,” she answered.

She wanted to see a cowboy.

The international pull of the cinematic, scene, authentic, imagined “West” never ceases to amaze me.

I was reminded of its power again upon receiving news that Gagosian – the largest and most powerful art gallery in the world – is staging an exhibition for Richard Avedon’s (1923-2004) In the American West (1979–84) photo series at its London outpost to open 2026. The artist’s “In the American West” book was the focus of an exhibition at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris last year. Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the most influential photographers of the 20^th century.

Avedon spent five years, from 1979 to 1984, traveling to 21 US states researching and photographing. He conducted more than 1,000 sittings, finally producing 126 editioned images, 21 of which on will be on view in London.

Avedon himself is a testament to Western influence beyond its boundaries. He was born in New York to parents of Russian Jewish heritage.

After serving in World War II as a photographer in the Merchant Marine, he became a leading fashion photographer shooting for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue – where he worked 20-plus year – Life, and Look. He became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker in 1992.

He collaborated on books with Truman Capote and James Baldwin.

In 1962, the Smithsonian Institution staged Avedon’s first museum retrospective; two at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1978 and 2002) followed.

How big of a deal was Richard Avedon?

The movie “Funny Face” was loosely based on his life with Fred Astaire playing the Avedon role opposite Audrey Hepburn.

Avedon photographed pop icons, models, rock stars, intellectuals, and the nation’s most powerful politicians. And he was drawn to the West. To road trip across the West photographing miners and waitresses and laborers and drifters. Pictures of drifters – Avedon’s word – are prominent in the series. He also photographed mentally ill inmates at the State Hospital in Nevada and jail inmates. He visited slaughterhouses and rodeos and the Navajo Nation.

While he would continue publishing photographs throughout his life, In the American West is considered his magnum opus.

Richard Avedon, 'Unidentified migrant worker, Eagle Pass, Texas, December 10, 1979.' Courtesy Gagosian. Copyright Richard Avedon Foundation.

In the American West at 40

In the American West was commissioned in 1978 by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. An exhibition and book, “In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon,” debuted in 1985. The project was an attempt to survey the texture of life experienced by ordinary working people across the region in the 1980s.

With the help of introductions made by an assistant, Laura Wilson, Avedon selected a wide variety of people to photograph, representing a range of professions and rural pastimes, depicting often-overlooked subjects.

Using an 8×10 Deardorff camera, natural light, and scant props, Avedon photographed his sitters against a white backdrop, retaining the black border from the film negative edge to emphasize the images’ absence of compositional manipulation. Make no mistake however, Avedon road tripped with a team of assistants putting a great deal of effort into making the images look simple, spontaneous.

Subjects stare straight at the camera, almost confrontationally, mostly expressionless, an expression itself.

Seeking human connection, Avedon stood outdoors and next to the camera to engage with his subjects.

“All photographs are accurate,” Avedon stated. “None of them is the truth.”

In a departure from the conventions of series portraiture, he also named each sitter in the artworks’ titles, resisting both generalization and idealization. These are individuals, not “types,” although they’re “types” too. Photos from the series are titled by the subject’s first and last name and occupation, except for kids, in which case their age is titled, along with the date each photograph was taken.

Some of the final portraits were up to 4-by-11.

Gagosian’s “Facing West” exhibition in London includes works that have not been shown since their debut in 1985 and is curated by the photographer’s granddaughter, Caroline Avedon.

Richard Avedon, ‘Annette Gonzales, housewife, and her sister Lydia Ranck, secretary, Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico, Easter Sunday, April 6, 1980. Copyright Richard Avedon Foundation.

Factual, Fictional, or Fetishized?

Avedon’s sitters are “tough,” “proud,” “resilient,” “hardscrabble” – even the kids – all the tropes heaped upon working people, particularly the working poor, the people from whom America, not just the West, takes so much and gives so little. Many would be considered “white trash” is certain circles. “Rednecks” if they were Southern. “Hillbillies” if they were Appalachian. With no “western” landscape behind them, these people could live anywhere in America. The coal miner could be from West Virginia. The mental patient, anywhere.

The subjects are overwhelmingly white. I didn’t see any Black people when looking through all of the series’ images. That’s a strange omission considering Avedon engaged with the Civil Rights Movement as a photographer. I only recognized two Native American sitters. Numerous Latinx people are pictured.

The photographs walk a fine line of fetishization. Putting poor people on display like animals in a zoo for the fascination of outsiders. At least that’s how they read in 2026, 40 years later. When these images were published I was 10 years old. I don’t pretend to be knowledgeable about the specific cultural nuance they entered the world into.

The numerous coal miners Avedon pictured have their faces covered in grime and soot. That feels a little too on the nose now.

Richard Avedon, 'Joe Dobosz, uranium miner, Church Rock, New Mexico, June 13, 1979.' Courtesy of Gagosian and copyright Richard Avedon Foundation.

Fetishizing the “working class,” especially the working poor in the regions of America seen as exotic, alien, and bizarre to outsiders – the West, the South, Appalachia – has nauseating echoes to how photographers fetishized Indigenous people across the continent around the turn of the 20^th century. Curiosities, again, like animals in a zoo.

“Can you believe people like this actually exist?”

“The stories are true!”

Oddities, not equals.

Too quirky, too rough-and-tumble, too idiosyncratic.

I’m not charging Avedon with fetishizing. Maybe that’s a bias I bring.

The many individuals photographed with their shirts off interests/bothers me. Whose choice was that? Is that how they typically walk through life? It makes them seem “lower” to me. Take a person’s clothes off and you take some of their power away. These people have precious little power to begin with.

But images of tidy middle-class schoolteachers and accountants would be less likely to captivate and provoke through the ages the way Avedon’s ragged truck drivers, drifters, carneys, mental patients, oil workers, and ranch hands have.

As he said, “all photographs are accurate,” and these obviously are, no artificial intelligence manipulation here, but “none of them is the truth.”