Early Life and Education
Avedon was born Richard P. Avonda in New York City to a Jewish Russian family. He was the son of Jacob Israel Avonda, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who started a successful retail dress business on Fifth Avenue, and his wife Anna, who came from a family that owned a dress manufacturing business. Richard Avedon had an identical twin named Frank. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked on the school paper The Magpie with James Baldwin from 1937 until 1940. After briefly attending Columbia University, he started as a photographer for the Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex camera given to him by his father as a going-away present. From 1944 to 1950, he studied with Alexey Brodovitch at his Design Laboratory at the New School for Social Research.
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