Louise Avedon

After his military service ended in 1944, Richard, Louise Avedon's brother worked as fashion photographer for Bonwit Teller. It was here that he began to merge his interest in photography and poetry, as his shoots created artistic images reminiscent of a poem-nonlinear compositions with a story to tell.

To advance his photographic career, he practiced his photography by taking photos of his quite beautiful younger sister, Louise.

Louise’s beauty and her early death at 42 in a mental hospital haunted Avedon all his life, and it contributed to the tragic sense of life, which permeated many of his portraits.

In the magazine Egoiste, in 1985 he said: "Louise's beauty was the event of our family and the destruction of her life. She was very, very beautiful. She was treated as if there was no one inside her perfect skin, as if she was simply her long throat, her deep brown eyes . . . All my first models - Dorian Leigh, Elise Daniels, Carmen, Marella Agnelli, Audrey Hepburn - were brunettes and had fine noses, long throats, oval faces. They were all memories of my sister." Avedon Bio