Richard Avedon’s Portraits of the American West Ride Again

This article is part of our Museums special section about how art institutions are reaching out to new artists and attracting new audiences.

It started as a lark, the large format reinvention of the American West: The director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art was chatting with an adviser one day in 1978, a jokingly aspirational idea was lobbed — what if the biggest photographer in the world did a show with our little Fort Worth museum? But the lark had legs, a meeting was arranged and soon Richard Avedon was leaving his rarefied Upper East Side universe for gypsum plants and oil fields.

At the time, it was a sentimental and well-worn vision that defined the West: rugged cowboys, sweeping pastoral beauty, the triumphalist, freedom-loving heart of America itself. The idea presented to Mr. Avedon: Find something new.

Commissioning the 55-year-old photographer for the project was a stroke of genius and/or insanity. Mr. Avedon had achieved cover-of-Newsweek renown for his chronicling of fame, culture, power and influence in late 20th-century America. He knew little of the West, save those same myths he’d inhaled. Eager but cautious, he flew to Texas for a test run in March 1979.

Alongside two camera assistants and Laura Wilson, the Dallas photographer he’d hired to help research locations, Mr. Avedon set out for the town of Sweetwater, home of the annual Rattlesnake Roundup. Over the next few days they fanned out, scanning the faces for a certain quality — one that would eventually transfix and flummox audiences in equal measure. Whatever it was they found it in Boyd Fortin, a 13-year-old with blond locks and the carcass of a rattler in his hands.