Review: Ron Howard's exhilarating 'Avedon' places its lens on a master of photography

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Set us as preferred In the 20th century, an age of print, photography was the primary medium through which we understood the world beyond our personal field of vision.Pictures recorded and sometimes changed history.Once upon a time, mastering the technology of a camera and the chemistry of a darkroom provided proof of seriousness.

A person shooting even with a Polaroid or Instamatic had to reckon with the cost of the film, developing and printing, and so you chose your shots; you composed them carefully.It was a commitment, whereas now, anyone with a phone can take endless pictures, with little thought, it’s a reflex.

By dint of sheer numbers — Instagram processes some 500 million uploads a day — the practice has been devalued.That isn’t to say you can’t take a good picture with a phone, or that there aren’t plenty of serious artists working today, in old or new formats.But we have passed the age of the culture-shaping superstar photographer (and the culture-shaping magazines that gave them work).

Richard Avedon, who is the subject of an exhilarating new documentary, “Avedon,” directed by Ron Howard and streaming Wednesday on Netflix, was among the greatest of them, with a career stretching from 1947 — when, in his early twenties, he was sent by Harper’s Bazaar to Paris — almost until the day he died in 2004 while working in San Antonio, on a photo essay for the New Yorker titled “Democracy.” (He was the magazine’s first staff photographer; “Dick was a great magazine man,” says Tina Brown, the editor who hired him.) James Martin, executive director of the Richard Avedon Foundation, reckons it amounted to “about 16,000 sittings.”Even if you don’t know the name Avedon, it’s a good bet you’ve encountered his much reproduced 1955 “Dovima with Elephants” — “I think we sold one for...