This fashion photographer captured America’s forgotten workforce. 40 years on, the portraits are on view again

By Leah Dolan, CNN

London (CNN) — In 1979, photographer Richard Avedon packed up his antiquated Deardorff camera, jumped in a Chevy Suburban and drove across Texas, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, California and 15 other American states, hoping to capture an essence of the regions through the people who lived there. These were parts of the country Avedon, a native New Yorker, had never set foot in before. Typically, he was more familiar with the company of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn — subjects for his numerous fashion shoots and celebrity portraits. Now Avedon was driving through America’s wide-open roads, visiting country fairs, rodeos and slaughter houses, often pulling the wagon over whenever he found an interesting face.

It took him five years, and over one thousand sittings, to complete his mission. The resulting photography series, “In the American West,” catalogs miners, drifters, dryland farmers, prisoners, undocumented migrants, truckers, factory workers and meat packers in 126 freckled and mud-splattered portraits. Avedon’s ode to America’s forgotten workforce first went on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas in 1985. “Those images were so powerful,” said photographer Constance Jaeggi, whose 2025 series “Escaramuza” visited many of the same parts of the US that Avedon did. “Especially coming from Switzerland and having a more romanticized vision of the American West… Those photos were such a contrast with that.”

Now, four decades later, a unique selection of the original images are on display again — this time at the Gagosian gallery in London. Curated by Avedon’s granddaughter, Caroline Avedon, who has been an archivist at The Avedon Foundation since 2021, the show marks her first solo project. At 26 years old, Avedon has set out to make the much-lauded photography series feel accessible to her generation. “I’m technically Gen Z,” she said, standing in the middle of the whitewashed space. “I wanted to give younger people an opportunity to possibly connect with the subjects.”

Instead of just spotlighting portraits that are art-world favorites, such as “bee man” Ronald Fischer (which she remembers scaring her as a child), Avedon chose to shift emphasis onto the kids, teenagers and young adults that the photographer — who she regularly slips into calling “grandpa” — captured. She hopes the picture of Teresa Waldron, a fresh-faced fourteen-year old wife with a willful stare, or Tracey Featherston, a young smokey-eyed motel maid from Dixon, California, for example, might bridge the gap of professional or geographical differences for a new audience. “Human connection is found no matter what,” she said.

But when Avedon’s series first debuted, the work was criticized by some as exploitative. Questions centered on whether Avedon’s use of a stark white background stripped these real people of their deserved context, and flattened them into objects or characters to be consumed by the elite. “Who would not look alienated, who would not look dispossessed when asked to stand rootless against a seamless white paper?” read an essay in the Journal of the Southern Regional Council in 1987. But supporters argue that Avedon’s style didn’t interfere with what was essentially important documentary photography — and platformed a cross-section of people rarely seen. “Perhaps there was a certain reality in them that people didn’t want to be confronted with,” said Jaeggi, who lives between Colorado and Texas. “I look at those portraits and I think that not much has changed.”

The economic and political overtones of the portraits feel as relevant today as ever. The late Jimmy Carter sat in the Oval Office when Avedon first began his journey out west, but just a year into the project the country had been turned on its head by a surprise presidential victory from Ronald Reagan. However, as poverty worsened, it soon became clear that regardless whether it was a Democrat or Republican in the White House, the lower working class communities of the American West would continue to be sidelined in the national conversation. Speaking at the exhibition preview, Caroline Avedon called the show “incredibly important,” echoing Jaeggi in that little progress seems to have been made in terms of how the US treats its industrial workforce. “We overlook the people behind the scenes that are keeping America going,” she said.

One of the most striking photographs in the show is that of B.J. Van Fleet — a cherubic nine-year-old boy holding a shotgun with unsettling ease. Caroline Avedon feels a particular affection towards Fleet, who she calls “one of her children” (even though today the young boy would be pushing 50). In fact, Avedon feels so deeply attached to her grandfather’s subjects that she regularly tries to find them on the internet. “A lot of the work that these people were doing was incredibly dangerous,” she said. “So a lot of them have unfortunately passed.” But she is pleased to report that “Fleet is alive and well,” and that she has also exchanged messages with the descendants of Richard Wheatcroft — a young rancher Avedon developed a personal relationship with after photographing him numerous times. (Two portraits of Wheatcroft shot two years apart appear as a diptych in the second room of the exhibition).

Recently, Avedon tried to find Freida Kleinsasser — a young Hutterite woman her grandfather photographed in 1983. The image, on show in London, looks more like a Steven Meisel Vogue editorial shoot as Kleinsasser stares down the lens in a chintz-patterned high-necked dress and a polka dot headscarf. In the end, all Avedon could locate was an obituary of Kleinsasser’s grandmother, but she was pleased to see her wearing the same polka dot scarf. “Which I thought was so sweet,” Avedon said.

“By finding these people, I feel like I can connect to my grandfather when he was meeting them,” she continued. “I think it’s also cool to be able to walk through the show knowing, ‘Oh that guy is doing this, and this woman’s doing that.’”

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