Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:
One of Tina Brown’s most striking innovations during her tenure at the New Yorker across the first half of the nineties was naming Richard Avedon as staff photographer, and he and I were to have several striking collaborations across that period (for example, he photographed both Breyten Breytenbach and Roman Polanski in conjunction with my profiles of the two of them), but perhaps my most moving interaction with him grew out of a small dinner he threw for me and my wife one evening in the fall of 1993. The open dining space of his compound was surrounded by racks upon racks of high-end luxury couture in preparation for his next day’s magazine assignments, but during dinner he grew especially interested in Joanna’s tales of her work for Polish Solidarity in its first iteration in the early eighties and her subsequent far-flung assignments for Human Rights Watch, in which context she began describing plans for the upcoming HRW gala which was going to be commemorating the 45th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights through a celebration of twelve monitors drawn from all parts of the world. Which in turn got Avedon and me to plotting a possible collaboration of our own, with his photographs of the monitors to be accompanied by my text—a collaboration which Tina promptly greenlit the next day.
more here.
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