In The American West – Richard Avedon (I edition)

The work that Avedon did over the course of five years around the American West was to select the most characteristic faces of this macro-region, capable of best representing the degraded culture that had developed among the city suburbs. We see, set against a white background and isolated from their context of origin, so silently eloquent, the portraits of a precise circle of figures, such as: vagrants, the mentally ill, prisoners, people forced into a strenuous working life, but also children who have grown up too fast. A sequence of 120 black and white photographs with strong contrasts, which is now considered a classic. A beautiful document to immortalise the new American ‘Big West’.