Title: Nothing personal
Photographer(s): Richard Avedon
Writer(s): James Baldwin
Designer(s): Marvin Israel
Publisher(s): Dell Books, New York, U.S.A
Year: 1965
Print run:
Language(s): English
Pages: 92
Size: 17,5 x 24 cm
Binding: Softcover
Edition: 1^st 1964, Atheneum and Penguin Books, U.S.A
Print: Printed in U.S.A
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: U.S.A.,
ISBN:
Both born in New York, Avedon and Baldwin met as students in the late 1930s, when they were attending DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and working for the high school literary magazine, The Magpie. Nothing Personal was published a few months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the US law that outlawed unequal registration in elections and racial segregation in schools, and a year after the assassination of John Fiztgerald Kennedy. In describing American society, he focuses on civil rights and the rise of black nationalism, but also discusses other current issues of the time, such as the mental health care system, Hollywood celebrities and their excessive mythologizing. And it does so with the black-and-white portraits for which Avedon has become famous, and with four essays by Baldwin critiquing a ‘disconnected, unjust and divisive society’, and thus one in crisis, which at times resembles today's. The people photographed by Avedon are civil rights icons, intellectuals, politicians, pop singers, psychiatric hospital patients but also ordinary Americans, and are often juxtaposed with each other in a jarring and provocative way, as is the case with the photo of the Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg next to that of the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell.
When it came out, the book was much criticized, but it is now recognized as an important work that renders well the confusion of American society in those years. As the New York Times recalls, Robert Brustein criticized the sophistication of the book's cover in the New York Review of Books, disapproving of it for its alleged incoherence. Brustein wrote that the book was ‘meant to be a ruthless indictment of contemporary America, but the people who are likely to buy this pompous book are the subscribers to fashion magazines, and its self-righteous authors are also quite fashionable, influential and chic’. Truman Capote came to Avedon and Baldwin's defence in a letter published in the magazine: ‘Would you rather it was printed on a paper napkin? [...] Brustein accuses Avedon of distorting reality. But can one say what reality is in art? An artist, to repeat Picasso, does not paint what he sees, but what he thinks about what he sees. This applies to photography, provided the photographer is an artist, and Avedon is one'.
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