American Style and the Fashion of Democracy: Richard Avedon, Truman Capote, and Alexey Brodovtich's Observations

Observations, a photobook by Richard Avedon, Truman Capote, and Alexey Brodovitch, was at the time of its 1959 publication dismissed as a coffee table book and a vanity project. Since then, the book has fallen away from scholarly attention. This article recoups Observations as a potent venture by its authors to comment on democracy as little more than an arbitrary style of being in the world. It argues that Observations characterizes “democracy,” whether as a quality of the book-medium or as a type of governance, to be as much a superficial cultural myth as the celebrity personae of Babe Paley and Marilyn Monroe, or the attractive designs implemented by Brodovitch in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. The book eschews the supposedly “democratic” function of the photobook to critique its inability to intervene in cultural crises, and to extend that criticism to convey “democracy” as simply another fashion, easily commercialized. Chief interlocutors are Frank’s The Americans (1959), Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and In Cold Blood (1965), and among relevant critics are Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and Lucy Lippard.