Rare prints from Richard Avedon’s In the American West shown in London

Rare prints from Richard Avedon’s photographic series In the American West are on show at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill in London in an exhibition curated by his granddaughter, Caroline Avedon. Richard Avedon: Facing West presents works that have not been shown since their 1985 debut and brings together 21 of the 126 editioned images produced after more than 1,000 sittings across 21 US states between 1979 and 1984.

The portraits focus on hardscrabble, working‑class America and individual identity, and include subjects such as Petra, photographed on her birthday, coal miners photographed just after a shift, and a drifter whose presence Caroline Avedon describes as “intensely present and confrontational”.

The show highlights tensions of visibility and anonymity: a uranium miner is paired with a man whose release form records him simply as "unidentified", and several Hutterite subjects, including a 13‑year‑old named Freida, were absent from the original 1985 presentation, about which "no clear explanation was recorded at the time", Caroline Avedon says.

Individual portraits also carry personal testimony — Rochelle Justin later said her portrait "captured exactly how I felt – that no one heard me" — and Avedon wrote of the series, "To be seen is to be heard … this body of work now belongs to the people who are in it … it’s between them and you." Richard Avedon: Facing West is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 14 March.