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Initially, Howard, who spent three years making the film, thought it was going to be more focused on the fashion and celebrity worlds that Avedon inhabited. However, his fascination with photographs like “sad Marilyn” (Avedon’s 1957 portrait of Marilyn Monroe) grew into a respect for the full breadth of Avedon’s career, and his “creative courage as an artist.”
In the film, footage of Avedon and new interviews with Lauren Hutton, Tina Brown, Adam Gopnik, Hilton Als, Joel Meyerowitz, Larry Gagosian, and Avedon’s son John, among others, paint a picture of a driven, curious, and sometimes mercurial artist. In the 1950s, Avedon’s career took off when he began shooting for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. He injected a sense of play and prewar European glamour into his images by drawing inspiration from the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Eventually, he ventured into documentary assignments and more political subjects, including Nothing Personal (1964), a photobook with text by James Baldwin that captured the tensions of the Civil Rights era alongside a broader look at American life, a three panel portrait of anti-war protesters the Chicago Seven, and members of America’s political and financial elite at the time of the country’s bicentennial (“The Family”) for Rolling Stone. At the height of his career, he seemingly shifted quite easily from photographing celebrities to documenting anti-war protests and the counterculture of the 1960s, even when his work was met with mixed reactions.