Richard Avedon was as luminous as the stars he photographed. A titan of Twentieth Century art, he gave the world lasting images of its icons. Starting with his first sitter, the Russian pianist-composer Sergey Rachmaninov, who then lived in the same New York apartment building as his grandparents, he went on to create the definitive portraits of a whole constellation of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn.

It’s no surprise that his legacy includes photographs of many literary greatest too, and a new exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Paris spotlights his portraits of Truman Capote, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, Ezra Pound and the poet Marianne Moore. But while their words were each uniquely their own, their image was all Avedon’s.

Avedon: Writers is at the Gagosian Gallery, Project Space, Paris until July 28.
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Photograph courtesy of The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Tags: Audrey Hepburn, Avedon:Writers, Gagosian Gallery, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, Jorge Luis Borges, Marianne Moore, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Avedon, Truman Capote