Richard Avedon, Marilyn Monroe (1957). Picture courtesy The Richard Avedon Foundation Source: Supplied Richard Avedon, Truman Capote (1955). Pictures courtesy The Richard Avedon Foundation Source: Supplied Richard Avedon, Dovima with Elephants (1955). Photographer Richard Avedon in front of some of his self-portraits. Despite these humble beginnings, Avedon, like France's Henri Cartier-Bresson and Australia's Max Dupain, eventually became an emblematic chronicler of his country and culture. His subjects ranged from the feted and famous (Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, the Dalai Lama) to the dispossessed. In 1963, he photographed William Casby, an African-American who had been born into slavery in Louisiana, the elderly man's face a road map of the hardships and heartbreaks he endured. Le Monde once described Avedon as "the most lucid observer of our society. One of the two or three greatest living photographers of our time. Yet many Australians are unaware of the full sweep of the work of this artist, who died in 2004. Here he is known mainly as a fashion photographer, says Chris Chapman, senior curator from Canberra's National Portrait Gallery. This should change, however, when a broad-ranging exhibition of his work opens at the gallery later this month. Titled simply Richard Avedon: People, it will focus on the photographer's groundbreaking portraiture and will be the first exhibition of Avedon's work to be shown in the southern hemisphere. Two and a half years in the making and devised in collaboration with the New York-based Richard Avedon Foundation, the show features 80 works that include stark yet revealing portraits of 20th-century luminaries such as James Baldwin, Dorothy Parker, Louis Armstrong, Pablo Picasso and Truman Capote. It also features more recent portraits (Bjork, Chet Baker and a 2m tall shot of choreographer Merce Cunningham) alongside images of rural battlers, inmates of a 1960s mental hospital and 40s New York street life. Chapman, who curated the exhibition, says it illustrates strikingly diverse aspects of Avedon's six-decade career as a fashion, portrait and documentary photographer: "There are really two goals for this exhibition - first, to introduce Richard Avedon's work to audiences here. The exhibition offers a representation of his work over the course of his life from the 1940s until 2004. Also, the exhibition brings out what is at stake for Richard Avedon as an artist, as a photographer, his absolute concern for creative freedom, the creative rights of the individual in society. After completing his military service, the still youthful Avedon started doing fashion shoots for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue in New York. He quickly showed himself to be an innovator. As The New York Times has put it: "He revolutionised the 20th-century art of fashion photography, imbuing it with touches of both gritty realism and outrageous fantasy, and instilling it with a relentlessly experimental drive." Chapman says: "One of the main innovations in Avedon's style was to take models out of the studio and into the street, as it were, and his work from that period has a fantastic sense of dynamism and flair about it." The Canberra exhibition, which will tour to the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Melbourne's Monash Gallery of Art next year, includes a signature fashion image from that period, Dovima with Elephants. In this shot, a model in a Dior gown poses between two restive elephants, her elegant, elongated frame a counterpoint to the animals' vast bulk. A lifelong New Yorker, Avedon is one of the US's most widely exhibited photographers: he has had high-profile shows at Washington's Smithsonian Institution and New York's Metropolitan and Whitney museums. He rubbed shoulders with celebrities and became one - he was the inspiration for the fashion snapper character portrayed by Fred Astaire in the 1957 film Funny Face and he would later make the cover of Newsweek. But the man who said he believed in "type As" and "maniacs" but not in weekends, would periodically leave the confines of his Manhattan studio in search of more sobering raw material - he compiled visual essays on wartime Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), civil rights activists and the US's rural heartland. In the late 70s and 80s he turned his lens on the curdling of the American dream for his series In the American West. In one Canberra-bound image, an adolescent boy holds the guts and skin of a huge rattlesnake he has just eviscerated, his cherubic looks overridden by an insistent frown. While the Richard Avedon Foundation describes this series as Avedon's magnum opus, it attracted the ire of some critics. Complained one reviewer: "He wants to portray the whole American west as a blighted culture that spews out casualties by the bucket: misfits, drifters, degenerates, crackups and prisoners entrapped, either literally, or by debasing work." Despite their ostensible objectivity, Avedon didn't see these portraits as true-to-life. Instead, he argued "the moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer a fact but an opinion." Driven and demanding, Avedon contended that an artist "must betray your mistress for your work ... Work is the one thing in the world that never betrays you, that lasts. It's fitting, perhaps, that he died doing what he loved best; in 2004, he suffered a cerebral haemorrhage while on assignment in Texas for The New Yorker. In art circles, Avedon was perhaps best known for his studio-based style of portraiture, which often revealed something unexpected about a famous subject. "My photographs ... are readings of the surface," he once mused, adding enigmatically: "I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues. His portaiture style, Chapman says, "has become enormously influential for its stark quality and its boldness. What Avedon often does is place his sitter against a plain white background so we're face to face with the person in a very direct way, and he was able to draw out a surprising sense of intimacy or rawness that was very powerful. Monroe features in the Portrait Gallery exhibition in dramatically contrasting portraits. In one photograph, taken in 1957, she wears a slightly ill-fitting halter dress, her tense, downward gaze suggesting the inner turmoil that afflicted this exemplar of idealised female sexuality. In the second shot, taken with her then husband, playwright Arthur Miller, she reverts to her public persona - the impossibly glamorous blonde with her arms wrapped around her handsome, genius spouse. Even her platinum curls have recovered their fullness and gleam. Also in the exhibition is a remarkably unguarded image of Capote, his eyes closed and head tilted away from the camera, as if dreaming while standing. The author was 31 when this shot was taken, though with his thin, hollow chest he looks incandescently boyish. There are several nudes in the show, and the most talked about will surely be the image of legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who is so well endowed he is bound to set off tremors of insecurity among male viewers. Asked about this, Chapman hesitates, laughs and says: "Let's say there are many different body types represented in the exhibition." More seriously, he says this portrait presents Nureyev "as a supreme athlete and it has a logic in this exhibition for its boldness and showing him in a stripped-back way, literally." A young, startled-looking James Baldwin also makes an appearance. The celebrated writer went to high school with Avedon and in 1964 they co-created a picture book, Nothing Personal, designed to capture the different strata and values of American society, including its (then) institutionalised racism. This book was greeted with some hostility, Chapman says, as commentators objected to a fashion photographer offering gritty social commentary through his portraits of a former slave, Malcolm X and a mental hospital in the era of the straitjacket - all of which are in the Canberra show. The exhibition was developed in partnership with the Richard Avedon Foundation, which keeps a tight rein on the artist's work - images that exist today solely as negatives cannot be turned into exhibition prints. Chapman, who made several trips to New York to choose the exhibition's photographs, says this seemingly restrictive policy is about maintaining Avedon's high technical standards. "Avedon was a terrific, skilled craftsperson," he says, "and worked with studio members of enormous technical ability, so the quality of the silver gelatin prints is absolutely exquisite. That quality is not conveyed in any reproductions that people will have seen in books or online. Seeing the prints face to face is really a quite extraordinary experience. They're just a knockout. Richard Avedon: People opens at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, on August 23.