Richard Avedon’s Gabriel García Márquez

Richard Avedon had long wanted to make a portrait of Gabriel García Márquez. He first photographed the writer on a rainy day in 1976, but he felt that the portrait was a failure. In 1999, he wrote a letter to Jon Lee Anderson, whose Profile of García Márquez had just appeared in The New Yorker, expressing his desire to try again. “I have a group of portraits which are meaningful to me—Borges, Beckett, and Francis Bacon—and of course, Marquez belongs in their company. Congratulations on a disciplined and wonderful portrait of a great man. I know how difficult that is to do.” Avedon finally had another chance to photograph García Márquez in Mexico City, in 2004. This is the portrait that emerged from that second session.

Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico City on March 29, 2004. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.