GIFT BOOKS : Avedon’s Apologia : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, <i> By Richard Avedon (Random House: $100; 432 pp.)</i>

Within the context of his contemporaries, Richard Avedon is best thought of as the mirror opposite of Gary Winogrand, the documentary photographer who scoured the streets of New York City, capturing odd, serendipitous images with his handheld, 35-millimeter camera. Whereas Winogrand found his subjects out-of-doors in zoos, parks, and various other public places, Avedon is an emphatically indoors, studio photographer. His portraits of the rich and famous, as well as of the destitute and ignoble, almost invariably reveal the human figure frozen in a carefully arranged pose, isolated from any identifying context by the featureless white backdrop that is so integral to his unnervingly motionless images.

One of his best known photographs features a naked and entirely hairless bee-keeper, as pale in complexion as a cadaver, who emanates a sort of Buddhist contemplativeness, an uncanny tranquillity belied by the writhing mass of honey bees swarming grotesquely over his body. In another disturbing portrait, Avedon photographed an actress from Andy Wharhol’s Factory in an imperious black cape which falls open over her abdomen to reveal her distended pregnant belly and her hand defiantly pinching her right breast, whose swollen nipple she seems to be proffering to the viewer. In both photographs, he presents his subjects in a way that dramatizes their individuality by minimizing their interaction with their environments and thus forcing them into a position of defenseless exposure, unprotected by the clutter of background objects that might divert our attention from the harsh physicality of the bodies he so ruthlessly examines.

Consisting almost entirely of images, including many from his controversial series “In the American West,” Avedon’s magnificent new “Autobiography” contains some of his best work, from shots of hideously disfigured napalm victims to high society photographs of ancient dowagers who stare out at the camera with the haunting solemnity of ancestral spirits. Perhaps the book’s only major shortcoming is that, despite his assurances in its opening pages that he has carefully arranged this disparate collection of unrelated photographs to represent his gradual “loss of all illusions,” it constitutes an autobiography only by the wildest stretch of the imagination. Although he argues in these brief introductory remarks that his failure to present the images chronologically was deliberate in that he has not lived chronologically, since each distinct moment of his life has reached forwards and backwards across time through echoes and foreshadowings, the narrative pattern that he outlines in his preface is so implicit and subjective as to be all but indiscernible to anyone other than his closest friends.

And yet if the book fails as an autobiography, it succeeds as an apologia, a self-defense, especially against the charges most frequently leveled against him that his work in the fashion and advertising industries has disqualified him from serious consideration as an artist and turned him instead into a lap dog of the well-to-do, an indentured slave of the power elite. Left-wing academic critics in particular have systematically--and quite unjustly--vilified his photographs of drifters and cowboys as an ideologically suspect form of slumming, an exploitative and patronizing effort on the part of a stooge of the ruling classes to manipulate America’s perception of the proletariat.

Avedon’s visually splendid rebuttal of the arguments of these unforgiving ideologues, who often portray him as nothing more than a decadent society’s court portraitist, operates by means of a curious juxtaposition of images in which the meat packer rests cheek-by-jowl with the poet, the famous with the down-and-out: a photograph of a Beverly Hills comedian with that of an inmate at a state mental hospital; a homely and despondent Carson McCullers with a battered yet ruggedly handsome bum; the disarmingly boyish Bob Dylan with a disgruntled factory worker; or a freckled grain thresher, as sexually alluring as a Hollywood teen idol, with the blind Borges, his nose upturned, looking as disoriented as a nocturnal animal seeking some point of reference to get its bearings. Because the photographs have no accompanying captions (which are printed only in the back of the book), Avedon deliberately confuses his readers by leaving them stranded in a maze of images in which they must thumb back and forth between the photographs and the index to find out if they are looking at a portrait of a fashion designer or of a trucker. The result is that important information about the rank and station of his figures is submerged in this leveling format that obliterates class distinctions and thus undercuts the charges of patrician elitism so recklessly directed against his work.

Defying the often facile objections of academic postmodernists by means of this self-consciously democratic strategy of keeping us guessing, Avedon shows clearly that his aesthetic treatment of his subjects has always been remarkably uniform and, to an extent, blind to differences of class in that he is just as pitiless with his debutantes as with his bag ladies. No matter how tattered or ostentatiously dressed, their social rank tends to evaporate in the devastatingly clinical examination he makes of his subjects, who are forced to submit to a massive invasion of their personal “space.” Even his best know celebrities become little more than craggy landscapes of blackheads and zits, wrinkles and dewlaps, receding gums and bllod-shot eyes, crow’s-feet and varicose veins on the nose -- ravaged features in which all indications of one’s economic status blur into a single human face, that of a ghastly pariah afflicted with a nightmarish array of dermatological disorders.

Another way in which Avedon attempts to distance himself from the liability of his own reputation as a fashion photographer is to splice into the book images of the grotesque right next to electrifying images of models whose outlandish, hieratic poses suggest the very summit of elegance and savoir faire. In one such gruesome pairing of photographs, the Parisian model Dovima stands with one danty yet obstreperous hip thrust out at the viewer so that her lower abdomen protrudes from her preposterously complex gown, while on the opposite page a headless Andy Wharhol shows off his chest and belly criss-crossed with livid welts and scars like railroad tracks, a patchwork quilt of intricate stitching from the wounds he received during an assassination attempt. Avedon aggressively undermines his high fashion images with unwelcome reminders of the decay and fragility of the human body, planting throughout the book a series of photographs that function as memento mori, grisly non sequiturs of corpses from the catacombs of Palermo, which are interspersed with seemingly invulnerable images of the American and European glitterati.

These vanitas photographs of the catacombs, as well as those from his series documenting a state mental hospital in Louisiana, are symptomatic of another of the book’s weaknesses: Avedon’s occasioal propensity to lapse into outright tendentiousness when he makes trite rhetorical gestures flaunting his awareness of both the mutability of his gorgeous subjects and the radical inequities that they often perpetuate. Avedon’s democratic strategy is a clever one, but when he begins to shape his work into a sermonizing rejoinder to his critics, he becomes shrill and self-conscious, thus compromising the quality of his best shots with a silent but nonetheless deafening form of photographic self-advocacy.