From the series, In the American West, explores some of Richard Avedon's most powerful portraits. He traveled throughout five years, meeting and photographing the plain people of the West: ranch workers, roustabouts, bar girls, drifters, and gamblers. The series is a collection of 124 photographs culled from a larger body of work executed in the summers from 1979 to 1984, when Avedon and his assistants traveled through the 17 Western states in search of human icons who would correspond to Avedon's expectations. The traveling exhibition of the work was inaugurated at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, which originally commissioned the project. While the portraiture of his contemporaries focused on single moments or composed formal images, Avedon's stark lighting and minimalist white backdrops drew the viewer to the intimate, emotive power of the subject’s expression.

"A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be dis.covered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as mine, but the control is with me."

– Richard Avedon, In the American West

Richard Avedon (1923–2004) is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Born in New York City, Avedon began his professional photographic career in 1942 in the U.S. Merchant Marine Photographic Department and attended the Design Laboratory at the New School. He began work as a photographer for Harper's Bazaar in 1945, eventually joining rival Vogue magazine, where he would remain on staff until 1988. He received a Master of Photography Award from the International Center of Photography and his work is included in the collections of MoMA, the Smithsonian, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with countless other museums and institutions worldwide. Avedon’s work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions around the world, including “In The American West, 20th Anniversary Tour,” Amon Carter Museum, Texas (2005, traveled to Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Center for Creative Photography, Arizona; and Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, California). He is the only photographer to have had two major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1978 and 2002. A 2007 retrospective exhibition organized by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark traveled to Milan, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and San Francisco.