I'll Be Your Mirror.(Brief biography)

Byline: LESLIE CAMHI editor: Valerie Steiker

A slew of shows and a spectacular book celebrate Richard Avedon this fall.

Everyone wanted to be photographed by him," the author and New Yorker drama critic John Lahr recalls of his friend and sometime collaborator Richard Avedon. "Not just because he was chic and good but because they wanted to see what he saw in them." Now, four years after Avedon's death, and on the heels of his first major European survey (on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris through September), a spate of exhibitions and a spectacular new book celebrate the intimate theater of the self that unfolded each time a public person stepped before his camera.

Born to Russian-Jewish parents in New York, Avedon got his start snapping sailors in the merchant marines. But it was while photographing the French collections in postwar Paris that he made his mark. At the Jeu de Paume, we find Suzy Parker playing pinball in a fluffy white cocktail dress by Lavin-Castillo; or a supremely elegant Dovima in Dior, framed by elephants.

And it was as a portraitist ("that wonderful, terrible mirror," Jean Cocteau called him) that he left his greatest legacy. "I have a white background; I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us," Avedon explained of his classically minimalist art. That thing, more often than not, was magical. Performance/Richard Avedon (Abrams; October) charts the progress of the latter twentieth century through the faces and gestures of the noted actors, writers, musicians, clowns, dancers, magicians, and others who strutted and fretted their hour upon his studio's bare stage. Rudolf ...