AMERICA IN TURMOIL SKIN

These two outsiders wanted to take the pulse of this вЂnewвЂ™ America, and expose its underbelly. The two worked together on the school newspaper, cementing a friendship that would be rekindled in the creation of Nothing Personal. This rage comes from its authorsвЂ™ own experience вЂ“ Richard Avedon, a Jewish boy from New York, went to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he became friends with James Baldwin, a black, gay boy from Harlem. But for all its spectrum of stars, Nothing PersonalВ is angry, unsparing in its exploration of the hypocrisy of an America that claims to offer opportunities for people to achieve their dreams, while grinding so many of its countrymen underfoot. It is totally beautiful, an exquisite exercise in minimalism by Harpers BazaarвЂ™s art director Marvin Israel, with surprises on every page: a naked Allen Ginsberg, for instance three generations of Luther Kings filmstar Monroe captured with her guard down. Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Parker face off on adjoining pages the fervour of Malcolm X follows the depletion of President Eisenhower members of the American Nazi party salute their distracted leader the camera comes close in on the face of William Casby, one of the last living men born into slavery. In it Avedon traversed the length and breadth of the nation, photographing the famous and the infamous, the renowned and the unknown, the old and the young, the vain and the shy, the beautiful and the mad. No matter what the law said, white men and black men were in conflict.ДҐ3 years on, Taschen has rereleased Nothing Personal, and it remains as uncomfortable and relevant as ever.

AMERICA IN TURMOIL SKIN

While the world celebrated the 1960s as a time of progress, free love and liberation, under the skin of the United States thrummed an undercurrent of racism, homophobia, violence and fear.

The Civil Rights Act had just been passed, Kennedy had just been assassinated, the Vietnam War raged interminably on.

When James Baldwin and Richard Avedon published their monograph Nothing Personal in 1964, America was in turmoil.

America in turmoil