When Dick Met Jimmy

Before Richard Avedon became one the most celebrated photographers of all time, he was coeditor of his high school literary journal with James Baldwin

- By Stephen Mooallem

Richard Avedon once won a teenage poetry contest. It's a tiny factoid that bobs like a buoy in the great sea of accolades that has surrounded his body of work as a photographer-one he began creating at Harper's Bazaar in the waning days of the Second World War and continued to reshape until his death in 2004 at the age of 81. Avedon's winning entry in the 1941 Scholastic Art & Writing competition was a poem called "Wanderlust," in which the narrator appears eager to leave home in search of new people, places, and experiences despite those who caution him to take a more conventional path. It begins with the couplet "You must not think because my glance is quick/To shift from this to that, from here to there," and concludes, "I know my drifting will not prove a loss, / For mine is a rolling stone that has gathered moss."

A sampling of what Avedon found as he ventured out into the world with his camera will be on view in "Avedon 100," a new exhibition opening on May 4 at the West 21st Street outpost of Gagosian gallery in New York. The show, to mark what would have been his 100th birthday, brings together close to 150 images drawn from every corner of his six-decade career as a fashion photographer and portraitist and selected by the likes of Hilton Als, Elton John, and Kate Moss. These include examples of his monumental work for Bazaar between 1944 and 1965-among them, perhaps his most monumental, a 1955 image now known as Dovima With Elephants, of the model Dovima, a forerunner to the "super" version of the 1980s and '90s, regally swathed in a Dior gown and flanked by a pair of pachyderms at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris.