Exhibition Highlights

Richard Avedon was one of the 20th century’s true visionaries, a photographer who completely changed how we look at fashion and portraiture. You likely know his signature style: those crisp, sharp images against bright white backgrounds that capture a person’s inner spirit rather than just their face. Before Avedon, fashion photography was often stiff and still; he brought it to life with movement, emotion, and real stories.

We invite you to join us at Gagosian on Grosvenor Hill for Richard Avedon: Facing West, this exhibition brings together rare prints from his landmark series In the American West (1979–84). Some of the works on display haven’t been shown to the public since they first debuted over forty years ago.

When this series first premiered in 1985, Avedon was already famous for his work with celebrities, world leaders, and the civil rights movement. However, In the American West marked a turning point. By focusing on the lives and faces of working-class people, he created what many now consider his greatest masterpiece. This exhibition offers a chance to reflect on these powerful images and see how their meaning has grown and shifted over time.

The project was a massive undertaking. Over five years, Avedon traveled through twenty-one states and held more than a thousand sittings. From those sessions, he produced 126 final images—21 of which are now waiting for you to discover here in London.