What’s Happening: The legendary fashion photographer’s centenary has prompted a slate of high-profile exhibitions celebrating his legacy—and his unmatched ability to harness deep feeling from a single still.

The Download: “Iconic” is a word often tossed around, seldom deserved. But in the case of Richard Avedon, who revolutionized fashion photography over his six-decade career, the term almost doesn’t hold a candle. The lifelong New Yorker began shooting high-profile editorials for Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s when, even at the age of 21, he began developing a signature style of candid colorless images that, as Cindy Crawford once put it, made models “come alive.” Dovima posed fearlessly among elephants; Truman Capote’s svelte torso conveyed a queer vulnerability. Avedon imbued fashion photography with a sense of experimentation that balanced fantasy and realism and still proves influential to this day.

Avedon’s legacy is so outsized that when curators at the powerhouse Gagosian Gallery were tasked with assembling an exhibition to commemorate the late photographer’s centenary, they left the task to 150 of his former subjects. “Avedon 100,” which opens in New York on May 4, enlisted artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion-world heavy hitters to select their favorite Avedon photograph and explain what it means to them. Raf Simons praised his emotional resonance, complexity, and lack of hierarchy; Brooke Shields commended his architectural eye. The full selection will be available in a 300-plus-page tome published by Gagosian when the exhibition opens.

Many polled for the show picked images of starlets and society swans—a morose Marilyn Monroe, a graceful Gloria Vanderbilt—but others opted for his late-career series In the American West, often considered his masterpiece. Commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in the late 1970s, which is presenting 13 of the photographs, it provides a disarmingly aromantic glimpse inside the sprawling heart of America then loosely defined by freedom-loving cowboys and sweeping pastoral beauty. Avedon shot the series over five years in 21 states, intent on simply finding something new.

What Avedon uncovered—rugged drifters, teenage lovebirds, a shirtless man covered in bees—proved both transfixing and baffling to those accustomed to his chronicling of high society. But the sobering candor of his photographic style suited his humble subjects well, or at least got their message across. “With his plain background, everything else becomes important, like the expression and the pose,” writes Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra in Avedon 100. “He’s making common people feel special so you take the time to look at them.”

Avedon was fiercely protective of his legacy, burning thousands of images he deemed subpar. By the time he died, in 2004 at the age of 81, photography was evolving into both a well-respected art form and a lucrative collecting field. It was also becoming universal as digital capture entered the fore. In an era where always-on iPhone cameras have become a second-nature method of broadcasting “content” to feeds everywhere, there’s still ample wisdom to plumb from Avedon’s nonpareil ability to harness emotion from one compelling still.

In Their Own Words: “My photographs don’t go below the surface,” Avedon said in 1970. “They don’t go below anything. They’re readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.”

Surface Says: He also quipped that “All photographs are accurate; none of them is the truth.” Does that mean he predicted Instagram filters?

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It’s impossible to put Garance Vallée into a box. That’s likely because her Parisian upbringing in a family of creative polymaths pushed her to study architecture and scenography in college, when she began illustrating quaint scenes of painted fronds and wavy, surreal-inspired chairs. But an influential meeting with Ada Tolla—the LOT-EK founder who navigates sculpture, scenography, and architecture with ease—encouraged Vallée to broaden her stylistic vocabulary even further. That sparked a few marquee moments: a major Milan Design Week installation, a show at Carvalho Park, and illustrations for Maison Perrier-Jouët.

Add a new capsule collection with Nordic Knots to that list. An artful interpretation of the Swedish rug purveyor’s existing Grand Collection, the trio of New Zealand wool rugs features totemic cutouts at playful angles. They make enough of a statement on their own but also fit snugly together like puzzle pieces. “It works like tiny architecture, almost like a small modernist house,” Vallée says, which informed the decision to style and shoot the capsule in Maison Louis Carré, an Alvar Aalto villa on the outskirts of Paris. “[That] represents the link between my inspiration of the Modernist currents, but also has this very contemporary and 2.0 rigid angle—almost laser-cut shapes.”

The brand’s co-founders Fabian Berglund and Liza Laserow, who most recently collaborated with New York architect Giancarlo Valle on both a series of folkloric rugs and their new showroom in a historic Stockholm theater, had long admired Vallée’s approach to world-building. They were instantly on board when she presented the idea to scale up a series of small paper cutouts into rugs. “For us, how the rugs exist in a context of the art, furniture, and design around it is as important as the rugs themselves,” Berglund and Laserow say. “With Garance, it’s all about the world she creates, where all the elements play together with each other, with the rugs being one part of that world.”

For more than two decades, the World’s 50 Best Bars has served as one of the industry’s most coveted accolades and a guide for locals and travelers seeking the globe’s most inspired drinking dens. Now the prestigious organization is expanding its scope. Starting this year, the Bareksten Best Bar Design Award will honor standout aesthetics and is open to any bar, regardless of age or location.

For design aficionados, the award offers an opportunity to discover innovative and thoughtfully designed spaces that elevate the overall hospitality experience. The award’s six key pillars—innovation, aesthetics, accessibility, ergonomics, ecological compatibility, and emotional quotient—underscore the importance of design in setting the tone and atmosphere for a memorable night out. Judged by a panel of design industry experts, including Alia Akkam, Anirudh Singhal, Bethan Ryder, Paul Semple, Scott Baird, and Shaun Clarkson, the award will be presented at The World’s 50 Best Bars ceremony in Singapore on October 17.

The rising Franco-American painter’s cerebral abstractions serve as vortexes into the sublime, largely thanks to her mastery of molten bismuth, whose history contains mysterious astrophysical phenomena and whose iridescence lends her meditative canvases an otherworldly, transcendent sheen.

Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.

Bio: Seffa Klein, 26, Los Angeles and Northern Arizona.

Title of work: WEB (Walk Through Zero), 2023.

Where to see it: SFA Advisory, New York, until May 31.

Three words to describe it: Imaginary, terminal, sincere.

What was on your mind at the time: This work is part of a series called WEBs, an extension of my prior series, Gazes. The Gaze paintings emerged as a meditation on the power of focused attention to develop higher-order structures within one’s consciousness, thereby accessing a sense of order in the universe. They also reference my practice of “sun gazing” in which I safely gain energy from looking at the sun for short periods when it’s low on the horizon.

With the WEBs, I’ve created radiating compositions that encompass more complex forms than the Gazes, finding interconnectivity between many of the ideas I’ve explored over the past ten years. They propose the mindset that through our gaze we can perceive that everything truly belongs in the universe.

The art world has collectively sat at the edge of its seat ever since the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Lauren Halsey’s rooftop commission would be delayed by one year due to logistics. But after some time (and a little help from Hästens), the highly anticipated showcase finally opened this week. “It became more ambitious, more meaningful, and more important,” Max Hollein, the museum’s director, said at the show’s press preview.

It certainly checks those boxes—Halsey uses 750 glass-fiber-reinforced concrete tiles to create a 22-foot-tall structure that resembles an Egyptian-style temple, complete with four large-scale sphinx statues whose faces mimic members of her immediate family. Carved on the walls are graffiti tags, images pulled from Black-owned businesses, and other street signage from Halsey’s home in South Los Angeles. The installation plans to travel across the country there, specifically to her Summaeverythang community center, when it closes at the Met in October.

Wallpaper Projects is a boutique design studio specializing in custom-made, custom-fit, high-end wallpaper and fabric. Working closely with artists and clients, the brand’s experimentation with different materials and chemical processes promotes a collaborative exploration of exciting new designs with which they transform traditional uses of wallpaper and other wallcoverings for commercial as well as residential applications.

Surface Says: Wallpaper Projects designs wall coverings that feel more akin to murals. The studio transforms spaces through both its artist collaborations and unapologetic use of color.

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