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In 1985, In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon debuted at the Amon Carter Museum of Art in Fort Worth, Texas. It went on to tour the country, drawing record-breaking crowds and generating a substantial response, both positive and negative. In the years that followed, it was to be remembered as “a landmark exhibition.” Yet, the exhibition has never been systematically discussed. In fact, it has rarely been critically examined at all. Even as contemporary photographers continue to cite In the American West as a source of inspiration, critical and historical analysis of this five-year-long, half-million-dollar commission has been surprisingly lacking.
This dissertation seeks to resituate In the American West—commissioned from a celebrity fashion photographer by a fine art institution—within the social, political, economic, regional and institutional contexts from which it emerged. Moving beyond the hagiographic view of the project as a monumental undertaking involving enormous effort and visionary creativity that transformed the image of the American West, this dissertation will seek to analyze the production, presentation and circulation of both the exhibition and the accompanying photobook published by Harry N. Abrams. At the same time, the dissertation will also examine the signifying strategies and the power relations invested in Avedon’s photographs.
The early 1980s in the United States were a time of neoliberal social and economic policies and rising conservative values, exacerbating inequality and environmental crisis and destroying established communities, even while heightening nationalist rhetoric and, significantly, promoting the idea of the New West. In this context, whatever his intentions, Avedon’s representation of class is of particular critical importance: these are the first of the forgotten people whose political self-assertion thirty to forty years later has shaped our present moment, making the time ripe for revisiting In the American West.
