Brighton Photo Biennial 2006

“First published in 1964, one year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Nothing Personal was a compelling and disturbing portrait of the United States of America. Combining images and text in an elegant and provocative way, the artistic collaboration between Richard Avedon and James Baldwin was an incisive analysis of the United States in the mid-1960s and its inherent contradictions: the tension between what Baldwin called its invented self and its undiscoverable self; between its romanticized past and its denied present, between its image and its reality. Avedon and Baldwin’s project is still relevant forty years later, perhaps more so, provoking as it does questions about the state of the American nation and about the United States of America’s increasingly imperial role on the world stage. It sets a challenge to its viewers and readers to disentangle fact from fiction and to confront present realities, informed by an unromantic understanding of the past. Above all, Avedon and Baldwin’s collaborative venture sought to highlight the gap between how the nation saw itself and how it actually was, stripping away illusions of a comfortable and reassuring surface reality, replacing them with a portrait of a dysfunctional nation, locked into a history of violence and injustice.”

From ‘Strangers and Barbarians: Representing Ourselves and Others’, in David Chandler, John Gill and Gilane Tawadros (eds), Brighton Photo Biennial 2006, Brighton: Photoworks and Brighton Photo Biennial, 2006, published on the occasion of the second Brighton Photo Biennial, 6–29 October 2006. Participating artists were: Adel Abdessemed, Richard Avedon, Phyllis Baldino, David Claerbout, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Paul Fusco, Alfredo Jaar, Gabriel Kuri, Van Leo, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Lee Miller, Richard Misrach, Henna Nadeem, Mitra Tabrizian, Fiona Tan, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol and Orson Welles.