In the spring of 1993, I was summoned to meet the photographer Richard Avedon at his studio, a converted carriage house on New Yorks Upper East Side. Then the cultural editor of The New Yorker, I had been asked by Tina Brown, the editor-in-chief, to help scare up subjects for Avedon, who the previous year had been named the first staff photographer in the magazines history. The task was slightly absurd, as Avedon, though nearing seventy, still had his antennae very much alert. If his professional enthusiasms were very public, his private ones were often hidden. A little like Calvin Klein and Gianni Versace, two of Avedons biggest clients in that era, the photographers intimate life with men was not fully out; in fact, it wasnt out at all.

As I went in, I filed past a giant print of Dovima with Elephants, the 1955 photograph that Norma Stevens and Steven M.L. Aronson, in their capacious and valuable new Avedon biography Something Personal, call incontestably the most celebrated single image in the history of fashion photography. Avedon ushered me upstairs to his living quarters. For years, he chose to live in close proximity to his work partly for personal reasons. His long second marriage, to Evelyn Franklin, which lasted until her death, was not blissful. He never enjoyed the same level of conjugal harmony as Irving Penn, whom Avedon considered his only rival among living photographers. Something Personal devotes an illuminating chapter to the two mens time at Vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, after Avedon had first come to prominence at Harpers Bazaar. The book also provides another reason why Avedon may have preferred not to live with his wife: his bisexuality. Avedon, who was born in 1923, had a confidant for his affairs in Stevens, who was his devoted studio director and work wife.

That day at the studio, Avedon wanted to make sure I was sufficiently versed in his career. But he avoided showing me the fashion pictures with which he had made his name, including, for Harpers Bazaar, his glorious postwar re-inventions of Paris as a staging ground for fashion and his pictures of Mike Nichols and Suzy Parker in the French capital in 1962, which wittily sent up the toxicity of celebrity culture.

On a long table were tumbled dozens of images that reminded me of a 1982 campaign Avedon shot for his most extravagant client, Versace: The Pile of Beautiful People. Representing the world of entertainment was Olivia de Havilland (who did not, as Something Personals Avedon states, win an Oscar for The Snake Pit), Judy Garland, and Oscar Levant, who told Avedon that his shot of Garland was the greatest pharmacological picture ever taken. (Avedon, too, knew from pills.) From belles lettres there was Truman Capote, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin. That last was Avedons high-school friend and his collaborator on Nothing Personal, a 1964 coffee-table book with diverse American subjects and bracing social commentaries. (The first comprehensive presentation of photographs and archival material from Nothing Personal is on view at Pace/MacGill Gallery, in New York, through January 13; Taschen has published a new edition with the original essay by Baldwin and a new one by Hilton Als.)

Avedon saved the artists for last. Among them were Giacometti, Chagall, and Picasso. I recognized them all, easily enough. Still, I wasnt sure that Avedon, who as many past assistants testify in Something Personal, could be an abrupt taskmaster, had yet given me his trust. He ended my evaluation by placing down, with trump-card flourish, his portrait of Cocteau. Thats it? I cried. No Proust?