Unsettling
in scale as well as content, it’s a half-length portrait, larger than
life-size, of a curly-haired teenage boy who stands against a white
background holding up the sagging skin and shiny entrails of an
eviscerated rattlesnake. The headless animal’s dark blood is spattered
across the bib of his overalls; its curdlike guts squish through the
fingers on his right hand. The boy’s hieratic gesture is like that of
someone performing an ancient sacrifice, and his hard gaze suggests he
has been doing this for much of his young life.
Not many would choose such an image to welcome visitors. Mr. Hofmann is clearly proud of it, though, and more than 100 others like it.
As master printer on Avedon’s last major project, “In the American West,”
Mr. Hofmann was responsible for bringing out the myriad gray shades and
material details in “Boyd Fortin,” the portrait of the 13-year-old
rattlesnake skinner, and the other images of weathered, hard-bitten
characters featured in the landmark 1985 exhibition and book.
It
was a job, said Mr. Hofmann, that took almost three years to complete,
and one that he often could begin only after his other job — supervising
the technical side of Avedon’s commercial operations — was over for the
day. He and his assistant, David Liittschwager,
would often work late into the night at the Modernage photo lab on
Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. Their task was to emerge
from the darkroom with prints that met the photographer’s exacting
standards: portraits that combined razor-sharp optics with psychological
intensity.
“The
eyes were always critical for Dick,” said Mr. Hofmann, pointing to the
boy’s creased brow. “That’s the first place he looked in a print. If he
didn’t like the eyes, it didn’t matter about the rest.”
Mr. Hofmann’s respectful memories of Avedon, who died in 2004, are tempered by a perplexed irritation with the Richard Avedon Foundation, which the photographer set up in 2003 and which oversees his estate, including copyright issues and exhibitions.
Mr.
Hofmann has 126 prints from “In the American West,” 104 of them sized
16 by 20 inches, and 22 sized 41 by 57 inches. The prints are pristine,
having been stored in archival boxes for decades. None has suffered the
dings and scratches that can happen to photographs during shipment from
venue to venue for an exhibition.
The
prints were Mr. Hofmann’s reward for his labor, he said, explaining
that he struck a deal with Avedon in the fall of 1984: instead of money,
he would be paid with a signed print of everything he produced for the
project.
“Dick
had no conception of what people lived on, and asking him for money was
difficult,” he explained. “Being paid in prints seemed the path of
least resistance.”
But there is a snag. None of Mr. Hofmann’s prints from the series is signed.
In
the art market, Avedon’s photographs can be high-priced commodities.
His estate is currently represented by the Gagosian Gallery. A vintage
print from 1955 of his “Dovima With the Elephants” sold at Christie’s in
2010 for $1,148,910. Two weeks ago, at Art Basel in Switzerland, a print from “In the American West” of the so-called “Bee-man” was offered for sale in one booth for $155,000.
All things being equal, Mr. Hofmann’s collection, which he is eager to sell, should be worth a high multiple of that figure.
But
the Avedon Foundation has refused to authenticate them. It insists that
Mr. Hofmann has not provided sufficient evidence that he made these
prints under the terms he claims were agreed to with Avedon. What’s
more, its lawyer and director have informed Mr. Hofmann in writing that
should he ever attempt to reproduce any image for purposes of sale, they
will demand a penalty from him of up to $150,000 per print. And should
he sell them, they will sue the buyers, citing legal precedent in Lubell
v. Guggenheim, a case devised to retrieve art stolen by the Nazis.
For
now, then, their value cannot be determined: perhaps a lot, or a
little, or next to nothing. No auction house would dare to offer them,
for fear of a lawsuit. Museums, eager to stay in the good graces of the
Avedon Foundation, which shares a block of West 53rd Street with the
Museum of Modern Art, have been similarly wary.
So
as things stand, these 126 rare and impeccable photographs have become
as much a worry and a burden to their owner as they are a potential
bonanza.
To complicate matters, the Avedon Foundation is involved in a legal wrangle with another master printer for the photographer, Gideon Lewin.
Suits and countersuits have been filed concerning who controls the
copyright of photographs Mr. Lewin took of Avedon working with clients
in the studio. Questions have been raised over what is a photographic
“gift” and what is stolen property, and over whether a ledger, designed
to catalog every exhibition print made by the Avedon studio when he was
alive, is reliable.
Separate
though the cases are, both expose an open secret: that Avedon, like
many of the other most revered names in art and fashion photography, did
not do his own printing.
Mr.
Hofmann is an unassuming figure. Sixty-two years old, slight and
balding, with thick-frame glasses and a gray goatee, he speaks softly
and carefully, his accent faintly Southern. He makes his living now
shooting for advertisers and catalogs, but he is also in demand as a
printer for special exhibitions.
Continue reading the main story
The
son of Italian and Swiss immigrants — hence the unorthodox spelling of
Ruedi — he grew up in South Carolina and Europe. Through much of the
1970s, he thought he might become a psychologist or an architect. In
1978 he enrolled at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa
Barbara, Calif., where in 1979 a friend gave him a copy of “Avedon:
Photographs 1947-1977,” the catalog for a 1978 retrospective at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“It
really changed everything for me,” Mr. Hofmann said. “I studied the
book, tried to duplicate the pictures, see how they were done. I moved
to New York for the express purpose of working for Richard Avedon.”
He
got his wish in the winter of 1981 when he was hired as a lowly
assistant. “I was told, ‘You’re going to pick up pastry, you’re going to
do the floors,’” he recalled.
The
Avedon studio on the Upper East Side was at the time one of the most
prestigious in photography and probably the busiest, with a nonstop
parade of fashion models and celebrities passing through its doors. In
addition, lucrative advertising shoots for Calvin Klein and Dior kept
everyone jumping.
Doing
your job, said Mr. Hofmann, meant reading Avedon’s moods and
anticipating his wishes. “Dick was very personable and engaging,” he
said. “But he wasn’t someone with whom you had a conversation. He just
expected results. And if the results weren’t what he expected, there was
tension.”
The
studio had an apprentice system, and Mr. Hofmann was trained by other
assistants. By the end of the first week he was printing, he said,
although it was some time before anything was deemed good enough to
present to the boss himself. Only after he had earned his trust was Mr.
Hofmann promoted.
Within
six months, he was running the technical side of the studio and going
on shoots with Avedon around the country, including journeys to desolate
rural places where Avedon photographed the locals who would populate
his magnum opus, “In the American West.”
Commissioned
in 1979 by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Tex., the venture paid
Avedon $100,000 a year for five years. He and his crew traveled through
17 Western states and made portraits of 752 people. After it opened at
the Amon Carter, the exhibition toured the country to wide acclaim. The
catalog, published by Abrams, was a best-seller and is now a collector’s
item. Mr. Hofmann left the Avedon studio in September 1985; he had
agreed to stay on through the opening at the Amon Carter. A year later
he opened his own studio in the meatpacking district, where he worked
for 20 years.
The
photographer Laura Wilson documented the project’s gestation and birth
in her book “Avedon at Work: In the American West.” Published in 2003,
it features several photographs of Mr. Hofmann, some in which he is
holding cameras in the field for Avedon, others where he is working on
exhibition prints at Modernage, a photography lab.
In
support of Mr. Hofmann’s claim, and at his request, Ms. Wilson wrote a
letter on April 5 this year that recalls a 1984 visit to the lab. “I was
stunned by the amount of time involved, the long hours and painstaking
skills necessary to do these large prints,” she wrote. “I remember
saying, ‘Gosh, Ruedi, this is a lot of work. How are you being paid for
all this extra work?’ Ruedi told me he was being paid with prints. Dick
had agreed to give him a signed print for each image in the book and
exhibition. I am clear about this, certain of the recollection.”
During
our visit, Mr. Hofmann went to a desk in his dining room and read from
three other recent letters written by others employed at that time,
including Mr. Liittschwager and Norma Stevens, manager of Avedon’s
studio for more than 30 years. They all attest that their employer and
Mr. Hofmann had agreed orally to this financial pact.
The Richard Avedon Foundation disputes that any such arrangement could have taken place.
The
photographer’s son, John Avedon, and John’s wife, Laura, have been
mainstays of the board. Its current executive director is James Martin.
When
asked to comment on Mr. Hofmann’s assertion, Mr. Martin responded by
email that “no documentation proving the authenticity and ownership of
even one of these prints — let alone 120+ unsigned prints — has been
provided to the foundation.”
“The
documentation we did review was drafted by Hoffman a decade after
Avedon’s death,” he continued. “The notion that Richard Avedon knew
these unsigned prints were in Hofmann’s possession is not credible given
that Avedon did not conduct business in this wholesale and careless
manner.” The foundation director also wrote that Mr. Hofmann had many
years "during which he could have had Avedon sign, authenticate or
otherwise transfer these prints if they were legitimately in Hofmann’s
possession and meant as gifts or payments to him.”
Mr. Martin did not respond further. “There is nothing more to be said,” he wrote.
Mr.
Hofmann has sought legal counsel but has not pursued legal action.
“I’ve tried to keep things as cordial as possible,” he said. “But I’ve
made it clear that I want to sell these prints.”
Ms.
Stevens, once the director of the foundation, said she had tried to
serve as mediator in the situation. As longtime manager of the Avedon
studio and the only other living witness to what she agrees was a 1984
agreement about the prints-as-payment, she has backed Mr. Hofmann’s
version of events in a pair of letters, the first written more than
three years ago.
“Ruedi is a wonderful printer and a great guy,” she said by phone. “Very ethical. He did a great job.”
But
as it has become apparent that the foundation would threaten to punish
Mr. Hofmann financially if he tried to sell the prints, she has looked
for other ways in which he might be compensated.
At
one point the foundation suggested a trade: a signed print, unframed on
aluminum, from “In the American West,” in exchange for his turning over
the unsigned prints.
“Those
things are worth a lot of money,” Ms. Stevens noted, estimating its
value at $180,000. She urged him to accept the offer. Mr. Hofmann
thought it insufficient.
She
— and everyone else from those days — is not sure why he kept this
trove of prints for decades and never asked Avedon to complete his end
of the bargain. She said that he “wasn’t aggressive enough,” and added,
“Maybe he thought Dick was too busy and he didn’t want to bother him.”
“I
don’t know why he didn’t get them signed,” she said. “But he just
didn’t. I’d like to help him. But I can’t authenticate the prints, and
the person who can is dead.”
When
Avedon made an arrangement with Mr. Hofmann, he could have thought he
was getting the better deal. The market for photographs was then in its
infancy, and his own work was not in high demand. The record price for
an Avedon in 1985 — a portrait of Marilyn Monroe — was $1,100. (A
vintage print of this same image sold in 2008 at Christie’s for
$457,000.)
It’s
possible that as he watched his prices rapidly escalate in the 1990s,
Avedon realized that he had made a poor wager. He was known as a tough
businessman.
Just
as likely, he simply forgot about the prints in the rush of life. In
any case, he never offered to sign them, and his former employee never
asked him to. “Perhaps he thought the privilege of working for him was
payment enough,” Mr. Hofmann said in a frosty tone — one of the few
moments during our interview that he was less than reverent about his
former employer.
Mr.
Hofmann himself was slow to comprehend what he possessed. Not until
three years after Avedon’s death did he put up for auction a signed
diptych of the rancher Richard Wheatcroft, one of the leathery men “In
the American West.”
A
gift from the photographer, one of a handful he gave to those who had
worked with him over the long span of the project, it was chosen as the
cover lot for the Sotheby’s New York photographs catalog in the spring
of 2007 and sold for $160,000.
Only
two complete sets of signed prints from the series are known to exist:
one at the Amon Carter Museum; the other at the Center for Creative
Photography in Tucson, Ariz., where the photographer’s negatives are
stored.
An
unsigned print is not necessarily less valuable than a signed one.
According to Denise Bethel, former director of Sotheby’s Photographs
Department for 25 years, “it depends on the artist and the rarity of the
print, and its condition.”
“I can imagine, if rare enough, that distinction, between signed and unsigned, becomes almost academic,” she said.
She
cited two examples from 2006 in which Sotheby’s offered two palladium
prints of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz. One sold for $1.472
million; the other for $1.36 million. Neither was signed.
“The
question collectors have to ask themselves is: How many other chances
am I going to have to buy these exceedingly uncommon prints?” Ms. Bethel
said. "Maybe zero. So the savvy collectors aren’t going to wait for the
signed ones.”
“Provided,” she emphasized as a caveat, “there is no impediment to the sale.”
Mr. Hofmann is not the only former master printer to have a contentious relationship with the Richard Avedon Foundation.
Gideon
Lewin, 77, is a photographer who from 1964 to 1980 had a role in the
Avedon studio similar to the one Mr. Hofmann later assumed. During his
16-year tenure, Mr. Lewin claims to have printed the photographs for all
of Avedon’s exhibitions.
“He
had other things to do,” Mr. Lewin said by phone from his home in
Manhattan. “He was too busy with the clients. He was the hardest-working
man I’ve ever seen.”
Mr.
Lewin said that while teaching at the Pratt Institute in 2006, and
finding that his students had only a vague understanding of what the
recently deceased photographer had done, he had an idea to do a book
that would “show the lighter side of Richard Avedon, very young at
heart, and very funny.” It would feature the hundreds of photographs he
had taken of the master at work in the studio.
“Dick encouraged me to document him,” he said. “We were very close.”
In
2009, Mr. Lewin “got serious,” did layouts and signed a contract with a
publisher, Assouline, for a volume to be called “Behind the Scenes With
Richard Avedon.”
Mr.
Lewin said he had the full cooperation of the Avedon Foundation until
he submitted his essay. In it, he had written: “Avedon never went into
the darkroom. He hasn’t printed since 1950, probably.” Laura Avedon was
“enraged,” he said, laughing.
She
wasn’t the only one. Ms. Stevens, then the head of the foundation, was
also upset by the essay. “I was horrified by what he wrote,” she said.
“Gideon is very arrogant. He claims he did everything. He got a lot of
praise from Dick and was paid a lot of money. But he wasn’t in charge.
He is a very good commercial photographer. But that’s it.”
By
2011, the foundation had decided to block publication of the book by
insisting that all of the photographs Mr. Lewin had taken, because he
was still an employee of the studio, were not in his copyright but in
the foundation’s.
Mr. Lewin sued the foundation, which countersued. In 2012 a New York State magistrate judge ordered mediation.
“We were about 95 percent in agreement in 2014,” said Mr. Lewin, “and then they changed lawyers. So we started all over again.”
On
June 23, United States Distict Court Judge Kimba M. Wood, having been
advised that Mr. Lewin and the foundation had reached an agreement in
principle to settle, ordered the case closed.
Mr. Lewin said he had been allowed copyright on his own images, but that “there are several unresolved issues.”
Mr.
Martin wrote in an email: “If the settlement agreement can be
consummated in a timely fashion, the foundation will agree not to
challenge Lewin’s assertion of copyright in approximately 10 percent of
the images that he sought to obtain in this lawsuit, with the foundation
not being challenged by Lewin in the remaining 90 percent. Almost all
of the tangible property at issue in this case will either be returned
to the foundation or distributed to institutions of the foundation’s
choosing.”
What
unites the two grievances is that they both make clear that the
startling lucidity that characterizes an Avedon print was only partly a
result of his hand. Outsourcing, though, is anything but unusual in
photography, or in the history of art. Just as Rembrandt and Rubens
operated studios where assistants painted the fur or the armor, leaving
the faces and the virtuosic blending of the ensemble to be completed by
the master, numerous photographers through the 20th century employed
technicians to develop film and print negatives.
Edward
Steichen, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott and
Cindy Sherman are only a few who at some point in their careers hired
others to perform this labor-intensive, unheralded and often uncredited
task.
The
Avedon cases underline the ambiguous importance of the printer in art
photography. Yes, the impeccable prints by Mr. Hofmann were the product
of Avedon’s vision. Without Avedon’s immense intelligence, energy and
manipulative charm, the portraits would lack the impact and
psychological complexity that make them so prized. It was his eyes that
determined if Boyd Fortin’s eyes in the portrait photograph were
hauntingly affective and exactly what he wanted. But doesn’t the
printer, like the cinematographer on a movie, deserve to share a screen
credit along with the director?
Artists’
estates have a vested interest in playing down the role of printers and
assistants and in keeping unsigned copies off the market. One reason
has to do with commercial self-interest: It can be confusing or
difficult to sell something if multiple people deserve an unknown
measure of the praise for its excellence.
But
another reason, more historically minded, is for purposes of cataloging
an oeuvre after an artist’s death, for separating legitimate from
ersatz and for preventing fraud. After all, not much deters anyone with
access to a photographer’s negatives from printing a few unauthorized
copies, late at night in the lab, and secreting them out the door.
The Avedon studio hired a librarian in 1975 whose job it was to list in a ledger all editions of prints made for exhibitions.
The
foundation is arguing in its case against Mr. Lewin that a number of
prints in his possession were illegally made because they are not
mentioned in the ledger. He disputed this allegation — “Avedon gifted me
quite a few prints, some of them quite valuable,” he said — and part of
his defense rests on his contention that the ledger is far from
complete or accurate.
But
even if Mr. Lewin’s case is settled, it may not help Mr. Hofmann. There
is no mention in the ledger of the “In the American West” prints now in
his house, and neither he nor Ms. Stevens, who was in charge of the
studio at the time, can explain why.
To
conclude our visit, Mr. Hofmann, his wife, and their friend Richard
Corman (another former Avedon employee) led me on a five-mile drive to a
carriage house that has become a local arts center. Newburgh has a
picturesque setting along the Hudson but has been gutted by decades of
unemployment. We passed blocks of boarded-up houses and broken fences.
“The
city is on its knees,” said Mr. Hofmann, who last fall used this same
arts center to exhibit a show of his portraits of people in the
community, a “Pivotal Project,” funded by the city’s residents.
Inside
on this spring day, he had papered the four walls with photocopies of
his Avedon prints. The sheets were blank except for the names of people
in the portraits. “Boyd Fortin,” “Red Owens,” “Sandra Bennett.”
Mr. Hofmann would like to install his collection here.
Until
then, he is calling this temporary exhibition “Unsigned 126: American
West Collection.” Below this title he has hung six photocopies from
Laura Wilson’s book that show him assisting on “In the American West.”
But neither his name nor Avedon’s appears on the walls.
He
told stories about his late-night work on the project. A single
exhibition print might take 45 minutes, with each part of a face or item
of clothing receiving its own dose of timed light as he masked, dodged
and burned. “It was like a dance,” said Ann Hofmann, whose only chance
to see him some days would be at the lab.
Mr.
Hofmann’s high regard for his former boss as an artist is undiminished.
“Dick worked with an 8-by-10 the way others worked with a 35,” he said.
“I loved going through the Amon Carter with Dick and seeing the scale.”
He said Avedon “had no problem” acknowledging in public his role as the
printer of the series and at an Amon Carter symposium praised his
contributions.
Why did he never ask Avedon to sign them?
It’s not as if he didn’t think about this piece of unfinished business repeatedly over the years.
He hesitated in answering. “Out of too much respect,” he ventured. “Maybe lack of self-esteem.” Then he corrected himself.
“No,
not lack of self-esteem,” he said. “I thought I should just wait.
Dick’s life was about what he was engaged in at the moment. He had an
incredible life. He was active the second he woke up in the morning,
always moving forward. The agreement was there. It just wasn’t on his
mind.”
To
make sure that he didn’t leave the impression that he was naïve about
what he owned, or where his actions had led him, he spoke more
forcefully: “I’m not a lemming. I am not a simpleton.”
He
paused and then laughed, with more exasperation than amusement. “I just
want to be paid,” he said. “My wages were the prints. And the check
isn’t even in the mail.”
Correction: July 5, 2016
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the year of a photo shoot in which Ruedi Hofmann was working with Richard Avedon. It was 1983, not 1980.
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the year of a photo shoot in which Ruedi Hofmann was working with Richard Avedon. It was 1983, not 1980.
