At the Fondation Henri Cartier‑Bresson in Paris, now anchored in Le Marais, a quietly audacious spectacle unfolds: Richard Avedon’s In the American West—the entirety of its 103 stark, confrontational portraits for the first time in Europe.

One doesn’t travel west for serenity. One travels west, in the American tradition, for confrontation—of land, of labor, of self. Richard Avedon, most commonly seen as the court portraitist of the haute monde, understood this. And it is perhaps the most enduring of his heresies that he chose to forsake the silken world of Manhattan fashion studios and instead drag an 8×10 view camera through freight yards, slaughterhouses, oil fields, and county fairs.

The result: In the American West. Five years of fieldwork, 752 sittings, and a method so unforgiving in its uniformity—white backdrop, natural light, no props, no poses—it verges on judicial. These images do not flatter. They testify. On view through October 12, 2025, this exhibition presents coal miners, factory workers, showmen, and drifters in front of an unrelenting white canvas—their exhaustion rendered monumental in monochrome 

Curated by Clément Chéroux the show excavates both the final publication and the scaffolding of its creation—engraver’s proofs, annotated test prints, preparatory Polaroids, and correspondence with the photographed—offering us not only the portraits but the alchemy behind them.

There’s a familiar American impulse at work here—the journey westward not for conquest, but for understanding. Like another chronicle that tracked a motorcycle ride across the plains in search of something intangible called ‘Quality’, Avedon’s odyssey into the American interior was no less metaphysical. Over five years and 21 states, he pursued not beauty or fame, but essence. The men and women he encountered are rendered not as specimens but as symbols, stripped of setting, staring back from stark white with unrelenting presence.