In 1964, the photographer Richard Avedon and writer James Baldwin (pictured above), friends since their schooldays in New York, collaborated on an extraordinary book, Nothing Personal.  It was unavailable for many years until Taschen published a facsimile at the end of last year along with a second slim volume of previously unpublished pictures and a new essay by Hilton Als.

Avedon’s pictures for the book are mostly portraits, many of them of well-known figures from the early 1960s such as Marilyn Monroe, President Eisenhower, Billy Graham, and Malcolm X.  Scattered between these images of the powerful and famous are pictures of young civil rights activists, ordinary couples getting married at City Hall, and a shocking set taken in what would have been called in 1964 a mental hospital.  I flicked through these photographs, ignoring Baldwin’s essay, looking for and failing to find at first any connections between what seemed random images.  But as I looked again, and as I studied them more carefully, I started to see things linking the pictures.  Some are explicitly political in the narrow sense of the word.  Contrast, for example, the smug self-satisfaction of the young Billy Graham or the aggressive self-assurance of Governor Wallace with the innocent beauty of Dr. Martin Luther King’s young son.  Celebrities from the world of entertainment such as Marilyn Monroe, the Everly Brothers, and Fabian look lost, sinister, or superficial.  What at first seemed random gradually came into focus and took shape as an exposé, a visual indictment of the injustice, vanity, and cruelty that Avedon saw in contemporary American society.  It’s a visual catalog of spiritual bankruptcy lightened occasionally by an image of the innocence of a child or the sadness of a veteran.

If the intensity of Avedon’s pictures reveals itself slowly, Baldwin’s prose is blisteringly hot from the first line. His anger about the condition of America burns in every word.  Reading passages such as this, so true for its day and so resonant now, I was left wondering how he would excoriated Trump’s America:

“But we are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country – to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world. – and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told.  Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it; and God help the innocent here, that man or woman who simply wants to  love, and be loved.”

This is a powerful, beautiful, and timely book by two perfectly matched and intensely committed artists.  The accompanying volume, with additional documentary material and an interesting essay by Hilton Als, enhances the overall package.