‘Avedon’ Netflix Review: Ron Howard’s Documentary Celebrates the Photographer Who Helped Define the Look of the 20th Century

Magazines were the social media of the 20th century,” we’re told more than once in Avedon, Ron Howard’s documentary about legendary photographer Richard Avedon. The comparison may be debatable, but there’s certainly some truth to it. Magazines once set the pace for fashion, trends, public conversations and, more broadly, the way people saw the world. Today, much of that cultural influence has migrated to platforms like Instagram, TikTok and X. Avedon’s photographs became widely known primarily through major fashion publications such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Their pages gave him access to virtually every major star, celebrity and public figure of the century, while his images helped establish many of the looks and visual trends that eventually filtered into popular culture.

Produced with the involvement of Avedon’s estate, this is, unsurprisingly, a warm, affectionate and thoroughly celebratory portrait of the photographer. Howard’s film sets out to explore both his extraordinary talent for portraiture and his aesthetic ambitions, with somewhat less attention paid to his private life. Much as Avedon himself tended to do, Avedon puts the work front and center. A long list of people who knew him or worked with him, including models Lauren Hutton, Twiggy Lawson, Penelope Tree and Beverly Johnson, as well as fellow photographers, curators and writers, discuss his pictures, his style and his working methods. The photographs themselves, naturally, do most of the talking.

What stands out, even to viewers with little knowledge of photography, is his almost exclusive devotion to portraiture, usually against a stark white background that strips his subjects of any recognizable setting or realistic context. These are precise, intimate and remarkably detailed black-and-white images, often capturing people in moments of vulnerability or revealing unexpected sides of their personalities. There’s also a striking physical quality to many of them, a sense of movement and carefully choreographed gesture that makes the photographs feel almost alive. Most were connected to magazine assignments, whether fashion spreads or journalistic features, which gave them an additional layer of meaning and context.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Avedon became virtually synonymous with fashion photography, working with just about every major brand, model and publication in the business. But the documentary also makes an effort to take him beyond those familiar boundaries: following his travels across the United States and around the world as he photographed people from very different backgrounds (almost always, wherever he happened to be, against that unmistakable white backdrop), and even looking at more personal projects, such as his portraits of his aging father.

The heart of the film, though, lies in its gallery of celebrity portraits, each one unmistakably his. From Marilyn Monroe to Charles Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn to Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, James Baldwin to Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Dylan to Patti Smith, and on to some of his best-known advertising images, Avedon had an uncanny ability to find unexpected ways of photographing familiar faces. His subjects often revealed something that other photographers had failed to capture, or perhaps something they hadn’t even intended to show. That ability helps explain why he remained one of the most sought-after portraitists among the famous and powerful.

Every so often, Avedon also found himself facing harsh criticism, and Howard’s documentary makes clear how deeply some of those reactions affected him. Certain projects and exhibitions were accused of being detached from the everyday reality of ordinary people, or of reflecting an elitist vision of the world. Still, he never stopped believing in his own work. The film follows some of the personal and emotional difficulties he faced along the way, showing how he repeatedly found refuge, purpose and fulfillment in his art. Through his photographs, Avedon helped shape the visual language of the second half of the 20th century. His peculiar combination of glamour and vulnerability, elegance and underlying tension created an imagery that continues to inform the way we remember and understand popular culture from that era.

One particularly revealing anecdote gets to the heart of Avedon’s aesthetic sensibility. He recalled that, when he was a child, his parents would borrow dogs from neighbors whenever the family posed for photographs. The idea was to create a happier, friendlier, more wholesome image of family life, even if that image had very little to do with reality. Perhaps Avedon spent much of his career working in reaction to that childhood experience, discovering that beauty didn’t require borrowing a dog and that sometimes the truth only emerges when people stop smiling for the camera.