High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 September 30, 2004) was an American photographer. In an obituary, published in The New York Times, following Avedon's death, Andy Grundberg said that, "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century."Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish-Russian family. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked on the school paper with James Baldwin. After briefly attending Columbia University, he started as a photographer for the Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex camera given to him by his father as a going-away present.