An Autobiography

An Autobiography tells Richard Avedon's life story entirely through photographs, without a written narrative to explain them.

Published by Random House in 1993, the book gathers 284 duotone plates spanning Avedon's career from the 1940s through the early 1990s, printed unpaginated in a large folio bound in brown cloth beneath a clear acetate jacket. In his two-page preface, Avedon describes the sequence as tracking "three crucial illusions" in his life, starting with what he calls the illusion of laughter and a young man's discovery of how close it sits to panic. Portraits of the famous run alongside pictures of people no one would otherwise have known, arranged so the pairings argue with each other across the page.

The book functions as a working catalogue raisonné of Avedon's photography and was reprinted quickly after its first run. A signed, limited edition followed the next year to mark his retrospective at the Whitney Museum, and An Autobiography remains the fullest single volume of his portrait work, from fashion pages to the plainspoken faces of In the American West.