‘I’m looking for faces which surprise me’: how Richard Avedon photographed the soul of his subjects

Ron Howard’s illuminating Netflix documentary looks back on the career of one of America’s most inventive and versatile photographers

Richard Avedon had only taken a couple of frames when he accidentally hit his head on a light being held above him. The Dalai Lama burst into laughter. That was when Avedon snapped two more frames and announced: “Oh, I got it!”

Avedon’s assistant, Sebastian Kim, was baffled. “I was like, what the hell happened? There’s only four frames out of a roll of 12 frames,” he recalls in a phone interview. “I realised he knew at that moment that something had happened, a mistake had happened: he hit his head and the Dalai Lama lit up.”

Continue reading...