Essays by Jane Livingston, curator of the Whitney Museum exhibit of the photos in this volume, and New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik accompany more than 500 black-and-white photographs and color illustrations. Whether he's shooting lowly American drifters or the giant celebrities of the age, Avedon can make the human figure, particularly the face, look like something that the eye has never encountered before. A two-page spread of selected contact prints of the concert pianist and wit Oscar Levant is thoroughly terrifying—and impossible not to stare at.