Truman Capote
Richard Avedon, 1955, Gelatin Silver Print
"Never love a wild thing ... If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky." (Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote)
This is the first of two photographs Avedon took of Truman Capote throughout his lifetime. The shot indulges the young writer's performative insouciance, as Avedon's lens fixes him miles beyond mundanity. Capote is young, sensual, and unsullied by the grittiness of life he would go on to engage in his oeuvre. The portrait taken of the auteur almost twenty years later is not so charitable – every wrinkle is visible, every sleepless night gathered in his tired gaze. But here, when the celebrity is just thirty, that future is only a distant possibility, not yet immortalized in word or pigment.