AVEDON’S LOOK AT WILD WEST : AVEDON TAKES A GRITTY LOOK AT WILD WEST

They stand like bent ramrods, twisted pokers and charred fence posts. Ravaged by time and molded by hard labor or unfortunate circumstance, these miners, cowboys, carnies, waitresses, rattlesnake skinners and drifters have submitted to the will of one of America’s most celebrated photographers.

As they nervously faced Richard Avedon and his old-fashioned Deardorf view camera--in makeshift outdoor studios thrown up at rodeos and carnivals, truck stops and ranches--few of the subjects had a clue to his austere style or glittering reputation as a fashion photographer and portraitist. None could have guessed that his proposed “book of photographs on working men and women of the American West” would catapult their images into the blinding spotlight of art showcases and publications.

The larger-than-life-size portraits went public last weekend when an exhibition of Avedon’s six-year project, “In the American West,” opened at Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum, which commissioned the work. Despite competition with a Bruce Springsteen concert and the Lone Star Chili Competition, public interest reached near-fever pitch. Members of the press and invited guests flocked to opening festivities; lines formed three hours in advance for an unticketed symposium with Avedon; the museum bookstore rang up sales of the book on the project; and the artist was relentlessly peppered with questions and solicited by autograph seekers.

Avedon, 62, is a charming showman and a legendary artist, but that doesn’t account for all the fascination with his latest project. In focusing on the West’s unsung laborers--as well as the disinherited, the freaks, the jailbirds and the nut cases--he has touched a chord of familiarity that most observers don’t want to remember but can’t stop looking at. The grizzled, wizened, dirt-caked adults, the freckled, pock-mocked adolescents and the tousled children are all too believable.

Avedon’s West is not the setting of movie lore. Working in his trademark style, he has pinned human specimens to stark white backgrounds and stripped away every hint of environment. He tolerates no shred of romance and precious little nobility. Dignity and a surprising degree of tenderness shine through some pictures of youths, family groups and co-workers, but even these qualities seem to be the product of battle scars. A picture of a round-faced young father holding his trusting baby daughter upside down is as sweet and nourishing as any photograph ever made, yet the overall tone of the show is devastating.

Probably the more so because there is no obvious villain. These people are not victims of the Great Depression, refugees from some foreign despot or the products of ethnic prejudice. If they are victims of anything, it is hope and its flip-side, discouragement. Predominantly hard-working white folks, they may still believe that their children can grow up to be President. You know better as you meet their gazes, but it isn’t the sort of knowledge that makes you feel superior. The sense of lost dreams, wasted lives and unappreciated labor is too pervasive. This is not the vanishing West, all perfumed and riding into the sunset; it’s the unsavory West that’s with us.

Avedon is a slightly built fount of energy with a thick mane of graying hair. He squeezes your arm and makes you believe that he’s every bit as excited about these pictures as the crowds clamoring to see them. You think that it just might be true, for he has expanded his vision and emotional range while rigidly maintaining his aesthetic identity.

He used to say that he couldn’t photograph what he didn’t understand. A New York artist trained by Alexey Brodovitch, former art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon knew glamour, wealth and power, and made a reputation for himself accordingly. Now that he has turned his attention to the under side of the West, his rap is quite different. “I discovered that we have in common everything that matters: wanting our children to have betters lives than we have, worrying about our aging parents, trying to make the most of ourselves,” he said. “If I have one goal for these photographs it’s that people will pay attention to them and say, ‘That could be me.’ ”

Avedon’s inspiration for the project came during a period of recuperation on a friend’s ranch in Montana. He made a portrait of the late Wilbur Powell, a foreman who tended the photographer much as he cared for the livestock, and the idea for “In the American West” was planted. It wasn’t until the late Mitchell A. Wilder, founding director of the Amon Carter Museum, saw Powell’s portrait in Newsweek and offered Avedon the museum’s assistance, however, that he could afford to spend several months each year away from his New York studio.

Temporarily liberated from commercial work, Avedon hired an assistant, Laura Wilson, who subscribed to dozens of small-town Western newspapers, called Chambers of Commerce and scouted for public events and work situations where large groups of people would gather. On location, Avedon would search the crowd for faces, stalk the people who most interested him and, with Wilson’s help, approach them.

“I told them that if their portrait was used, we would send them a book and a print. If not, they had lost 20 minutes,” he said. (Some sittings took far longer and Avedon occasionally returned months or years later to re-photograph a subject, but his general mode of operation was to catch the idea for a picture on the spot and re-create it immediately in a short, intense session.)

As the shooting continued through the spring, summer and fall of successive years, the project took on the dimensions of August Sander’s “People of the 20th Century.” Avedon looked at thousands of people and photographed 750 on 17,000 sheets of 8x10-inch film. The printing consumed 68,000 square feet of paper, more than 1 million gallons of water and the talents of Ruedi Hofmann, a master printer who orchestrated incredibly complex manipulations to make the pictures match Avedon’s visions.

Though Avedon seems to have done an about-face in moving from Presidents, film stars and fashion models to grubby Westerners, one thing remains constant. He said it’s “the humanity,” but that seems secondary to his talent for timeless shock value. There’s no one quite like Avedon for confronting his audience with stunning images. His portraits can seem creepy and cruel, but this time around he gives you more than a wince and an icy shower. The pictures encompass a whole range of emotion as people expose themselves to the camera.

A painfully skinny shipping clerk with peculiarly side-swept hair has armed himself against the world with a flamboyantly studded jacket, but his corkscrew stance tells you just how much inner peace he has. Ravaged drifters in oversize clothes seem to shrink from the camera in an attempt to make themselves invisible or they lurch forward as if they have just stumbled out of a railroad car. Oil workers, photographed after a long day of labor, are so encrusted with goo that their jobs have oozed into their skin and clothing. A pudgy 9-year-old with his grandfather’s rifle looks like a hateful good ole boy in the making.

Scary stuff, but hardly less so than the revelations seeping from some of the less provocative pictures. Three unmarried sisters in their 40s, for instance, turn out to be co-presidents of the Loretta Lynn Fan Club. They operate a ranch together, travel with their father and wear identical clothes and hair styles. Other pictures seem to point to conditions that cause people to resemble each other. Two convicts have tattoos of Jesus on their chests and matching scars from knife wounds and surgery on their bellies. Some young lovers are already so drawn together that they look like brother and sister.

But work is the great connector here and never stronger than in Avedon’s portraits of Colorado coal miners. “I wanted them to be the black Goyas of photography,” he said. They aren’t because dreadful working conditions can never be as terrifying as madness, but they are extraordinarily haunting pictures. Behind the sooty surfaces are the gentleness of youth and the sense of men who know that their lives depend upon each other.

Avedon has been criticized for exploiting his subjects and he will be again on this project, though the subjects who attended the opening insisted that they don’t resent his intrusion. Avedon responded to this line of questioning by acknowledging “a serious moral issue here.” While he considers actors and politicians “fair game” and crucifies them without a qualm, he allows that the subjects of “American West” “have a right to feel used.”

“It’s not the best thing you can do, to use people who have no idea what you are going to do. I just hope I was true to something that they can feel good about,” he said with uncharacteristic modesty. “These are the people who give us everything, yet we don’t know them. My work wouldn’t be complete without them.”

When Billy Mudd, a Texas trucker photographed by Avedon, was asked how his buddies felt about his photograph, he answered, “Kinda jealous.”

And how did he feel about going down in history as an art piece? “Kinda great.”