Cher 20x30 Printed from original negative archival quality for collection purpose only From world famous fashion ARCHIVE IMAGE MAY VARY BUT FROM THE SAME SHOOT captured by the lens of Helmut Newton ORIGINAL HELMUT NEWTON RARE IMAGE PUBLISHED ....FROM WORLD FAMOUS FASHION ARCHIVE NEW YORK — When the legendary Gallagher’s Paper Collectibles shuttered its East Village doors in 2008 due to escalating rents, founder Michael Gallagher semiretired to the Catskills with his million-plus library of vintage fashion magazines, books and photography prints. He stored his unparalleled collection of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Flair and more arcane titles — some dating back to the 1860s — on a property he dubbed Fashion Farm in Greenville, N.Y. Now Gallagher’s is back, reopening today in a sleek new space at 12 Mercer Street. The shop will offer a small sliver of Gallagher’s archives, with the rest available by special order. The space is located adjacent to the offices of VFiles, an online social networking site launching in April that is a partnership between V magazine and former V executive editor Julie Anne Quay.This story first appeared in the March 19, 2012 issue of WWD. Subscribe Today. “We are in the middle of building VFiles and we were looking for incredible content and Mike has the biggest collection anywhere of fashion magazines and photographs and paraphernalia,” said Quay. VFiles brokered a deal to incorporate Gallagher’s material onto the new digital site, as well as open the retail space, which revives a New York institution. Gallagher’s first opened in the late Eighties and became known for drawing the cream of the fashion world to its basement bunker. Steven Meisel, Anna Sui, John Galliano and Donna Karan were regular customers. As his reputation grew, Gallagher curated entire fashion libraries of magazines and books for the likes of Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs. He recalled Catherine Deneuve sitting among his aisles, perusing old titles. Along the way, Gallagher — a sociable former child actor and model — befriended many in the fashion world. The late New York Times fashion editor and Old Navy pitchwoman Carrie Donovan bequeathed much of her library to him, as did Costume Institute curator Richard Martin. He was close to Richard Avedon, Francesco Scavullo and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who gave him reign to dig through their basements and archives. “I met everybody. It was a family. There were only, like, 200 people working in fashion back then,” recalled Gallagher, who buys continuously at flea markets, estate sales and online. In the light, airy new shop on Mercer Street, there are neat stacks of the usual suspects like international editions of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar from various decades, as well as specialty titles such as Versace: The Magazine, Wet and Actuel. There are also old issues of Spy and a curious magazine called Teens’ and Boys’ Outfitters, which dates to 1968. An 1865 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, in newspaper format, can be had for about $100. “They’re actually not that rare. What’s rare is the Twenties and the Art Deco years,” explained Gallagher, adding that eBay and the Internet have driven up prices. “Now there’s vicious, vicious competition. Fashion really sells.” Singer Cher is an American singer, songwriter, actress, model, fashion designer, television host, comedian, dancer, businesswoman, philanthropist, author, film producer, director, and record producer. Described as embodying female autonomy in a male-dominated industry, she is known for her distinctive contralto singing voice and for having worked in various areas of entertainment, as well as adopting a variety of styles and appearances during her career, which has led to her being nicknamed the Goddess of Pop. The art of Richard Avedon as seen through his photography. Rare one of a kind colorprint For your private collection only! This is in good condition rarity Richard Avedon was an American fashion and portrait photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century".
HISTORY
RICHARD AVEDON
Richard Avedon (1923–2004) was born and lived in New York City. His interest in photography began at an early age, and he joined the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) camera club when he was twelve years old. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he co-edited the school’s literary magazine, The Magpie, with James Baldwin. He was named Poet Laureate of New York City High Schools in 1941.
Avedon joined the armed forces in 1942 during World War II, serving as Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the U.S. Merchant Marine. As he described it, “My job was to do identity photographs. I must have taken pictures of one hundred thousand faces before it occurred to me I was becoming a photographer."
After two years of service, he left the Merchant Marine to work as a professional photographer, initially creating fashion images and studying with art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School for Social Research.
At the age of twenty-two, Avedon began working as a freelance photographer, primarily for Harper’s Bazaar. Initially denied the use of a studio by the magazine, he photographed models and fashions on the streets, in nightclubs, at the circus, on the beach and at other uncommon locations, employing the endless resourcefulness and inventiveness that became a hallmark of his art. Under Brodovitch’s tutelage, he quickly became the lead photographer for Harper’s Bazaar.
From the beginning of his career, Avedon made formal portraits for publication in Theatre Arts, Life, Look, and Harper’s Bazaar magazines, among many others. He was fascinated by photography’s capacity for suggesting the personality and evoking the life of his subjects. He registered poses, attitudes, hairstyles, clothing and accessories as vital, revelatory elements of an image. He had complete confidence in the two-dimensional nature of photography, the rules of which he bent to his stylistic and narrative purposes. As he wryly said, “My photographs don’t go below the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.”
After guest-editing the April 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon quit the magazine after facing a storm of criticism over his collaboration with models of color. He joined Vogue, where he worked for more than twenty years. In 1992, Avedon became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker, where his portraiture helped redefine the aesthetic of the magazine. During this period, his fashion photography appeared almost exclusively in the French magazine Égoïste.
Throughout, Avedon ran a successful commercial studio, and is widely credited with erasing the line between “art” and “commercial” photography. His brand-defining work and long associations with Calvin Klein, Revlon, Versace, and dozens of other companies resulted in some of the best-known advertising campaigns in American history. These campaigns gave Avedon the freedom to pursue major projects in which he explored his cultural, political, and personal passions. He is known for his extended portraiture of the American Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam war and a celebrated cycle of photographs of his father, Jacob Israel Avedon. In 1976, for Rolling Stone magazine, he produced “The Family,” a collective portrait of the American power elite at the time of the country’s bicentennial election. From 1979 to 1985, he worked extensively on a commission from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, ultimately producing the show and book In the American West.
Avedon’s first museum retrospective was held at the Smithsonian Institution in 1962. Many major museum shows followed, including two at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1978 and 2002), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1970), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (1985), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994). His first book of photographs, Observations, with an essay by Truman Capote, was published in 1959. He continued to publish books of his works throughout his life, including Nothing Personal in 1964 (with an essay by James Baldwin), Portraits 1947–1977 (1978, with an essay by Harold Rosenberg), An Autobiography (1993), Evidence 1944–1994 (1994, with essays by Jane Livingston and Adam Gopnik), and The Sixties (1999, with interviews by Doon Arbus).
After suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while on assignment for The New Yorker, Richard Avedon died in San Antonio, Texas on October 1, 2004. He established The Richard Avedon Foundation during his lifetime.