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.
Read more about this topic: Richard Avedon
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. It is the feeling early humans must have experienced when the firelight first overcame the darkness of the cave. It is the communal cooking pot, the Street, all over again. It is our need to know we are not alone.”
—Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)
“[The Declaration of Independence] meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“There are words in that letter to his wife, respecting the education of his daughters, which deserve to be framed and hung over every mantelpiece in the land. Compare this earnest wisdom with that of Poor Richard.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)