Richard Avedon once won a teenage poetry contest. It’s a tiny factoid that bobs like a buoy in the great sea of accolades that has surrounded his body of work as a photographer—one he began creating at Harper’s Bazaar in the waning days of the Second World War and continued to reshape until his death in 2004 at the age of 81. Avedon’s winning entry in the 1941 Scholastic Art & Writing competition was a poem called “Wanderlust,” in which the narrator appears eager to leave home in search of new people, places, and experiences despite those who caution him to take a more conventional path. It begins with the couplet “You must not think because my glance is quick / To shift from this to that, from here to…
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Harper's Bazaar (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2023