Edward Roop, Coal Miner, Paonia, Colorado, 1979

From 1979 to 1984, Richard Avedon (1923-2004) traveled cross-country to 189 towns in 17 states to create his iconic series In the American West. Commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum, Avedon traveled across the western United States, photographing ordinary people – miners, drifters, oil field workers, ranchers, among others – against a stark white backdrop. The result was a striking body of work that challenged traditional, romanticized depictions of the ‘Wild West,’ replacing them with deeply humanized portraits of adversity, resilience, and survival.

Unlike traditional documentary photography, which often seeks to capture subjects in their natural environments, Avedon’s approach was deeply intimate. By isolating his subjects against an identical neutral background, he stripped away any context, forcing viewers to engage with the body language of each individual. This technique heightened the emotional intensity of the series, creating a very different aesthetic to his typical glamorous, classic Hollywood style.

“I’m looking for a new definition of a photographic portrait…I’m looking for people who are surprisingly — heartbreaking — or beautiful in a terrifying way. Beauty that might scare you to death until you acknowledge it as a part of yourself” (Avedon as quoted in Avedon at Work: In the American West, 2003, p. 17).

Measuring up to four feet tall, Avedon brought his subjects out of the shadows and into a life-size presence and scale. It is significant that so many people unaffectedly submitted themselves to Avedon’s lens without the customary performance of a smile, or the instinctive readjustment of posture. His intentions were invariably motivated by a profound interest in interpreting human behavior, whether it was that of a movie star or cotton farmer.

The present lot depicts a coal miner from Paonia, a rural town in western Colorado. Avedon was particularly thankful for these miner’s participation as they agreed to be photographed after long shifts of risking their lives a mile beneath the surface. To show his gratitude, Avedon and his team created a small exhibition for the miners and their families, taping the prints to the exterior wall of the bathhouse near the mines. This marked the first time that portraits from the series were exhibited which, according to Avedon’s assistant Laura Wilson, “seemed fitting that they were seen first not by detached museum audiences but by the miners themselves” (Laura Wilson, Avedon at Work: In the American West, 2003, p. 101).