In the American West

Richard Avedon spent five years, 1979 to 1984, making photographs across ten western American states. The work was commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, which presented the exhibition in 1985. Abrams published the book the same year, alongside an essay by Avedon on his working method and a project journal by Laura Wilson, who accompanied him throughout. The book went out of print more than a decade ago.

This 40th anniversary edition, published September 2025, reproduces the same images at the same trim size: 28 × 35.6cm. John Rohrbach, photography curator at the Amon Carter, contributes a new foreword. Nothing else changes. No new images, no revised sequence, no retrospective apparatus.

The portraits were made against a portable white background set up outdoors or in the locations where subjects worked. Ranch hands, miners, slaughterhouse workers. The backgrounds give you nothing to read; the subjects received none of the social management that Avedon brought to his New York magazine sessions. The results have divided people who think seriously about photography: some read the work as exploitation of subjects who did not know what they were getting into, some as the only serious fine-art treatment American working-class subjects received that decade. Both readings are well-evidenced and worth pursuing before you decide.

The format suits the argument. At 28 × 35.6cm, faces fill pages. The plain white backgrounds that critics read as decontextualising are, at this size, simply white. The book stands or falls on whether you believe Avedon was entitled to make it. For that reason it belongs in any collection that takes portrait photography seriously.

A first edition now costs several hundred pounds on the used-book market. The 40th anniversary edition reproduces the original 103 photographs at the same scale, with Rohrbach's foreword placing the project in context for readers coming to it for the first time.