Letters

To the Editors:

Further to Robert Brustein’s review of the Avedon-Baldwin collaboration. He is quite right about the book, wrong in saying that Avedon is a photographer who “spends much of his career flattering celebrities with soft lights and blurred effects.” This school of photography has, for many years, been dead as a mackerel in fashion magazines, even for the fashions themselves. Far from a soft-focus man, Avedon has long been famous for exactly the distorted realism that Mr. Brustein objects to—enlarged pores, falling hair and the wrinkles of sadness or exhaustion, which are made to seem the truth about a celebrated personality…Brustein states the case admirably. But he ought to know that the savage editorializing in Nothing Personal in no way represents a departure for Avedon, whose reputation is largely based on this kind of chic depravity.

Eleanor Perenyi

Stonington, Connecticut