Richard Avedon photographed the faces of politics throughout his career and this book brings together his political portraits for the first time. Juxtaposing images of elite government, media, and labor officials with counter-cultural activists, writers and artists, and ordinary citizens caught up in national debates, it explores a five-decade taxonomy of politics and power by one of America s best-known artists. The book features several of Avedon s extended projects addressing these themes, including coverage of the civil rights debate in the early 1960s (published in 1964 in Nothing Personal); the American anti-war movement and the war in Vietnam from 1969-1971; portraits of the American power elite in 1976 for his groundbreaking Rolling Stone portfolio The Family;  Exiles: The Kennedy Court at the End of the American Century, a retrospective homage to the Camelot generation, published in The New Yorker in 1993; and his final photo-essay,  Democracy, surveying the American state of mind during the politically-fractious time prior to the country s 2004 presidential elections (published posthumously in The New Yorker in 2004). Richard Avedon, 1923 2004, was the most successful fashion photographer and portraitist in America throughout a six-decade career. After the war he worked for Harper s Bazaar and Theater Arts and began a fruitful apprenticeship with legendary editor, designer, and artist Alexey Brodovitch. Avedon invigorated the staid fashion photography of the time, staging fictional tableaux and developing an unprecedented theatrical style. His penetrating portraits were equally revolutionary; isolating his subjects against studio backdrops, he developed a style characterized by consistent poses and sharply focused detail. Moving to Vogue magazine in 1966 and The New Yorker in the 1993, Avedon continued to innovate in magazine and television advertising, and in fashion spreads and editorial portraiture. Extraordinarily prolific throughout his career, he produced many books, among them Observations (1959), Nothing Personal (1964), Portraits (1976), An Autobiography (1993), and The Sixties (1999). His exhibitions were some of the mostly highly attended and acclaimed shows of the late twentieth century.