Richard Avedon's Hollywood comes alive in more than 120 photos at Gagosian

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Set us as preferred In an audio interview in “Avedon,” the Ron Howard-directed documentary, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and streams on Netflix, beginning Nov.11, Richard Avedon is asked why he took up photography.

“I still can’t type,” he answers.“I can’t read my own handwriting.

I don’t think consecutively.I’m anecdotal.

I’m instinctual.But I can see like a son of a bitch.”The movie chronicles the famed photographer’s life and 60-year career shooting not just icons of the fashion and film worlds but also mental institutions, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

Avedon also focused extensively on the American West, which served as the setting for his 1985 portrait series of coal miners, oil field workers, ranchers, drifters and ordinary people that he considered his masterwork.Howard’s documentary features interviews with fellow photographers, models, magazine editors, writers, former assistants and art dealers, including Larry Gagosian, who reminisces about meeting Avedon for the first time in New York in the mid-1970s.Gagosian later brought one of Avedon’s exhibitions to the ArtCenter College of Design in 1976 and to Broxton Gallery, his first space in Westwood.

He opened Gagosian a few years later, leading to a decades-long relationship with the photographer and more than a dozen shows at the gallery in the last 15 years.Gagosian’s newest exhibition, opening Wednesday, is titled “Richard Avedon: Hollywood.” But the more than 120 featured images, spanning from 1947 to the year Avedon died in 2004, embrace all kinds of celebrities who represent Hollywood, not just as a place and an industry, but as a “global concept” and an “aspirational notion,” said curator (and Avedon’s daughter-in-law) Laura Avedon.“If you look at each individual portrai...