“And we’d run to one side of the room and keep going and going, back and forth, like a gazelle escaping from a lion. “He would just sort of… And now let’s go!,” Cleveland recalled of Avedon’s instructions accompanying his then rare usage of large shutter speed. The late great is famous for revolutionizing fashion photography by encouraging models to come to life instead of sticking to standards and staying stiff-but the way Cleveland tells it, they were mainly a select few such as Veruschka, Penelope Tree and herself. During the Vietnam War, he photographed students, counter-cultural artists and activists, and victims of the war in the US and Vietnam. In 1963-64, Avedon examined the civil rights movement in the American South. Tucked away in the most distant corner of the opening afterparty at the Standard’s Boom Boom Room, Pat Cleveland was eager to reflect on the decades she spent posing in front of Avedon’s camera. Avedon was dedicated to extended portraiture projects exploring cultural, political, and personal concerns. “He just told me a few different commands-how he would like me to hold my hands and just lift my chin a little, and we took the picture.” “He had a very similar technique to Robert,” the latter told me, referring to the other most famous photographer to capture her, Robert Mapplethorpe.
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