Photographs by Richard Avedon (c) 2008 The Richard Avedon Foundation. Sean Penn, actor, San Francisco, 2004

Although a life-long photographer who preferred his images to speak for themselves, Richard Avedon had a remarkable way with words. His ability to cut through things with a few short, incisive lines could often make him seem more like a sage than a lensman. After all, he’s the photographer who famously said that every photograph is a lie — a chosen lie at that — not “The Truth”, as was the artistic conceit of the day. There’s a perfect example of this ability in an Avedon quote inscribed at the beginning of Performance, a collection of well-known images of performing artists he took throughout his career, published in October by Abrams: “We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.” It’s this insight into humanness, and his never-ending fascination with it, that made Avedon such a great photographer. After all this time, and four years after his death, it’s nice to rediscover how much I truly enjoy looking at his pictures. Truth? Lie? Chosen reality? These are impertinent questions in the face of images that achieve exactly what Avedon intended them to. So open your eyes, look, and enjoy the show.