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Avedon, Unsigned
Ruedi Hofmann, master printer for the photographer’s magnum opus, “In the American West,” understood that his payment would be a set of signed prints. He has the prints, but they were never signed. Whose prints are they, anyway?
By Richard B. Woodward
Hanging in the foyer of Ruedi and Ann Hofmann’s art-filled home in Newburgh is a large black-and-white photograph by Richard Avedon.
Unsettling in scale as well as content, it’s a half-length portrait, larger than life-size, of a curly-haired teenage boy who stands against a white background holding up the sagging skin and shiny entrails of an eviscerated rattlesnake. The headless animal’s dark blood is spattered across the bib of his overalls; its curdlike guts squish through the fingers on his right hand. The boy’s hieratic gesture is like that of someone performing an ancient sacrifice, and his hard gaze suggests he has been doing this for much of his young life.
Not many would choose such an image to welcome visitors. Mr. Hofmann is clearly proud of it, though, and more than 100 others like it.
As master printer on Avedon’s last major project, “In the American West,” Mr. Hofmann was responsible for bringing out the myriad gray shades and material details in “Boyd Fortin,” the portrait of the 13-year-old rattlesnake skinner, and the other images of weathered, hard-bitten characters featured in the landmark 1985 exhibition and book.