Richard Avedon at the Met

Few photographers have communed with fame as much as Richard Avedon. A household name since the late 1950s, Avedon has snapped them all: actors, writers, poets, filmmakers, scientists, politicians and a stream of models long enough to fill up Broadway. His list of subjects is impressive. It includes American presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower and cultural arbiters like Harold Bloom. A who's who of merit, birth and, ultimately, power, Avedon's sitters meet the photographer in his artist's aerie more or less on equal footing. What emerges from their encounters, in the best of cases, is self-portraiture in the guise of portraiture, the face of fame looking critically at itself and swiping off the makeup.

Richard Avedon shares the distinction, along with David Bailey, the model for the lead in Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup, of being so famous a photographer that his living person inspired a movie. Played by Fred Astaire in the Hollywood musical Funny Face, Avedon the celebrity persona has long garnered curiosity, awe and respect among both critical and mass audiences. An enormously successful fashion photographer who is also universally esteemed as an artist, Avedon's crossover triumph has set a high water mark for the medium.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the rich are different from the rest of us, but in our time that condition goes to the famous. Since the invention of the medium, photography has served as fame's handmaiden, a natural conduit for recording and disseminating the images of the celebrated in an inexpensive package that, at different times, has appeared to capture the truth of its subjects, their fleeting afterimage and the dirty little secret built into their celebrity. Avedon, quite possibly the best celebrity portraitist of all time, has gone in for none of these. His interest has lain elsewhere, in the craggy lines and details he expertly teases out from fame's polished facade and, also, in the theatricality he magnifies on his subjects' practiced surfaces. Like all great masters of the medium, Avedon knows how to authenticate his misrepresentations. He's not really to blame if the world has taken these for gospel truth for some four decades.

"All photographs are accurate, none is the truth," the remarkably literate Avedon once said. The mesmerizing accuracy of his images is now on view at the Metropolitan in an exhibition of 180 black-and-white portraits dating from the late 1940s to the present. Stunning and uniform by turns, Avedon's signature boiled-down look, with its clean white backgrounds, sharp light and absolute absence of shadows, confers on its subjects the very essence of theatricality.

Eschewing backgrounds of any type (they were distracting) and middle and foregrounds (they were intrusive), Avedon has repeatedly cast his subjects into the role of individual Hamlets, epic figures in silver bromide that, in the sharply reduced quarters of their frames, mimic the world at its most dramatic. The photographer's lepidopterist's eye is justly famous for picking out the imperfections in their butterfly's camouflage (what the writer Margaret Anderson would have referred to as "preferring disfigurement to adornment"). So we have the image of W.H. Auden emerging rumpled as a day bed from a snowy New York street; Dorothy Parker, puffy and baggy-eyed as a bar crow; and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, in what is certainly one of the world's most famous images, looking so melodramatic as to momentarily convince even the most jaded eye of their genuine victimhood.

Certain writers have spoken of these portraits as unmaskings, which they are, though of a limited sort. An unmasking implies, of course, getting at an essential core, which even the best of Avedon's photographs rarely do. His own ambition for his photographs is that they record a certain type of stylized "performance," the more stylized the better. To this he owes his lifelong obsession with the theater and its principals, the actors; its endless play of surfaces and basic suspension of disbelief through artifice is the well from which he draws his greatest inspiration. The truth is that Avedon does not believe in essential cores or even in unmaskings. In his own words: "The point is that you can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. The surface is all you've got."

Surfaces beneath surfaces, acts that beget counter-acts, subjects who fall in and out of their public roles like performers in their dressing rooms. Strip the performance away and Avedon's pictures turn sensational and formulaic, theatrical in the worst sense of the word. Witness his photograph of Clarence Lippard, a Nevada drifter whom the photographer chose to accouter with a dinner jacket and a pocket square. All cancerous sunburn and liver spots, Avedon's image turns counterfeit precisely because of his subject's stage dress. The same thing happens in other pictures of his unjustly celebrated series In the American West, Avedon's book of portraits of truckers, oil workers and carnies. Shot like antiheroes, their poverty and humanness give way to the photographer's epic characterizations far more often than the images reveal anything about the sitters' own personalities.

Avedon's portraits are all about the largest possible themes played on the largest possible stage. His characteristic stripped-down minimalism allows his carefully chosen subjects to become, in a word, symbolic. Symbolic of what, you ask? The answer is simple: symbolic of themselves. Whether it's Marilyn Monroe looking withdrawn as the klieg lights dim, Isak Dinesen mugging maniacally in a wolf-skin coat or a younger Donald Rumsfeld puffed with his trademark self-importance, Avedon negotiates the self-impersonations of his best portrait subjects until he arrives at ones that dynamically capture the tension between their public role and their private self. Portraits not of mere mortals, Avedon's men and women are always the exact opposite of anonymous. Different from us and even from themselves, these images portray eminencies, personas, characters that are truly larger than life.

"Richard Avedon: Portraits," through Jan. 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave. (82nd St.), 879-5500.