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    The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family
    The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family
    The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family
    Ebook135 pages34 minutes

    The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family

    By Richard Avedon and Shannon Thomas Perich

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    About this ebook

    In the early 1960s, Richard Avedon was commissioned by Harper's Bazaar to create Observations, a column that consisted of a series of nine photographic essays. The subject of the first essay was John F. Kennedy and his young family, who sat for formal black-and-white portraits just three weeks prior to Kennedy's presidential inauguration. Six images appeared in the magazine's February 1961 issue.

    That same day, Avedon created more informal color portraits of Kennedy and his family at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach. One of these images ran as the cover of LOOK magazine's February 28 issue, with photographs by Avedon inside. Just before the magazine hit the newsstands and was delivered to over 6.5 million people, a set of photographs, comprised mostly of the LOOK images, was released by the White House and appeared in newspapers across the country.

    During his lifetime, Richard Avedon donated more than two hundred images to the Smithsonian Institution, including all of the photographs of the Kennedy family sitting for Harper's Bazaar. Smithsonian curator Shannon Thomas Perich has culled more than seventy-five images from that donation for The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family, making these stunning photographs available for view for the first time. Perich's introductory essay—accompanied by a wealth of archival photographs of both Avedon and the Kennedy family—provides historical background on the two sittings within a political and cultural context and critically examines the work of one of the finest photographers of the twentieth century. A foreword by Robert Dallek, distinguished historian and author of the bet-selling An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, provides authoritative and compelling insight to one of the most fascinating presidents in American history.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 12, 2010
    ISBN9780062042910
    The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family
    Author

    Richard Avedon

    Richard Avedon chronicled the latter half of the twentieth century with powerful portraits of artists, intellectuals, political figures, and events of the time. In a career spanning six decades, he turned fashion photography into an art form and reinvented the genre of photographic portraiture. His work is a vital part of the canon of the history of photography, and his donations of his work to the Smithsonian Institution have created a significant legacy of some of his most important images, including those in this book.

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      Book preview

      The Kennedys - Richard Avedon

      RICHARD AVEDON THE KENNEDYS PORTRAIT OF A FAMILY

      Shannon Thomas Perich | Foreword by Robert Dallek

      PNG

      This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Susan Whitley Thomas, and my own family, Scott, Thomas, and Maeve

      CONTENTS

      Foreword

      Introduction

      Harper’s Bazaar

      The Art of Avedon’s Photography

      The Photographs

      Acknowledgments

      Appendices

      About the Photographer

      About the Author

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      FOREWORD

      In 1901, William McKinley, a popular second-term president, was assassinated in Buffalo, New York. In 1944, 43 years after his death, he had joined the ranks of other largely nameless, faceless presidents like the two Harrisons, William Henry and Benjamin, Millard Fillmore, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and Chester Arthur. McKinley’s wife and family were as obscure as most retired or defeated members of Congress.

      Forty-three years after John F. Kennedy’s abbreviated presidency at the hands of an assassin, JFK, Jacqueline, and the children, Caroline and John Jr., remain as vital a part of the national political scene as if the Kennedys were still in the White House. Unlike McKinley, who Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt so greatly eclipsed, Kennedy has not had to stand in the shadow of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush, all of whom left (or in George W.'s case will leave) the White House under one cloud or another. Only Ronald Reagan seems to vie with Kennedy for the public’s continuing affection, but no one in the Reagan family can match the star quality of the Kennedy clan.

      Kennedy’s appeal, however, rests on more than the flawed records of his successors. It’s not as if Kennedy’s presidential performance was without its own failings: the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961; the unsuccessful meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961; the failed efforts to topple Castro’s government that helped provoke the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962; and the expansion of America’s military involvement in Vietnam between 1961 and 1963, which some have described as the prelude to Lyndon Johnson’s ruinous war that ultimately resulted in more than 58,000 U.S. military deaths, have not been sources of Kennedy’s high standing with so many Americans for over four decades.

      The enduring attraction to Kennedy has much more to do with his inspirational qualities. Presidents seem to be remembered less for their domestic and foreign policy accomplishments—unless there were extraordinary far-reaching actions such as FDR’s social security law, LBJ’s civil and voting rights measures, or such decisive military victories as Lincoln’s defeat of secession in the Civil War and FDR’s triumph over Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism in World War II—than their famous pronouncements. Washington’s Farewell Address, Monroe’s Doctrine, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, FDR’s nothing to fear but fear itself, Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex, and LBJ’s invocation of a Great Society are cases in point.

      Kennedy gave the country more than one memorable phrase: most famously Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country; and the still resonant Mankind must do away with war or war will do away with mankind.

      Yet ultimately, in this age when visual images seem to make a greater impression than words on people all over the world, it is the abundant and easily accessible television tapes and photographs of Kennedy and his family that continue to excite attraction to and affection for what can fairly be described as America’s first family.

      Kennedy was our first television president. His memorable first TV debate with Richard Nixon during the 1960

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