Truman Capote
Richard Avedon, 1955, Gelatin Silver Print
This is the first of two photographs Avedon took of Truman Capote, and here the young writer is held entirely apart from frail, mundane humanity. With performative insouciance, Capote appears caught up in his own reveries – he is sensual, young, and untouched by the grittiness of life that he engaged in his oeuvre. The portrait that Avedon would take of Truman almost twenty years later is not so indulgent – 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.