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Richard Avedon
Dick Hickock, Murderer, Garden City, Kansas, April 15, 1960, 1960, printed 1999

Avedon photographed Richard Hickock as the latter awaited trial for the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas — a crime that netted Hickock and his accomplice forty dollars and a portable radio. The minimal, straightforward style of the photograph highlights the idiosyncrasies of the killer’s face and suggests that the photographer is looking for evidence, should it exist, of a homicidal pathology.

At the time the picture was made, the country was gripped by the details of this apparently motiveless crime. In 1965 Truman Capote published In Cold Blood, his nonfiction novel about the Holcomb murders. Capote’s look into the heart of rural 1950s America had a disturbing documentary clarity not unlike Avedon’s portrait of Hickock.

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Dick Hickock, Murderer, Garden City, Kansas, April 15, 1960
Artist name
Richard Avedon
Date created
1960, printed 1999
Classification
photograph
Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
13 3/4 in. × 14 in. (34.93 cm × 35.56 cm)
Date acquired
2000
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Accessions Committee Fund purchase
Copyright
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2000.309
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Other Works by Richard Avedon

See other works by Richard Avedon

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