Ron Howard’s documentary Avedon began streaming on Netflix Wednesday, bringing the photographer’s private archive to a wider audience after a festival premiere earlier this year. The film traces how Richard Avedon moved between fashion assignments and portraits of Americans rarely seen in magazines, using previously unseen photographs, footage of him working and interviews with people who knew him.

The Cannes festival listed the film as a Special Screening in its 2026 selection. Netflix is releasing the film, which Imagine Documentaries and Fifth Season made in association with the Richard Avedon Foundation. That access gives Howard material that goes beyond the finished photographs. It also makes the film a portrait shaped in part by the people who preserve Avedon’s work and the collaborators who helped make it.

From fashion spreads to portraiture

Avedon was born in New York City in 1923. As a teenager in the Bronx he co-edited his high school’s literary magazine with James Baldwin, according to the foundation biography. He made identification photographs while serving in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II. After leaving the service, he studied with art director Alexey Brodovitch and took freelance assignments for Harper’s Bazaar.

The magazine work gave him a setting to experiment with what a fashion photograph could show. The foundation says he photographed models in streets and nightclubs and at other locations outside a studio. The images made space for movement and for the setting around the clothes. The Times review notes that Harper’s Bazaar sent him to Paris in 1947, when he was still in his early twenties.

Avedon later worked for Vogue for more than two decades and became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker in 1992, according to the foundation. Commercial work for fashion and cosmetics companies ran alongside projects on politics, the civil rights movement and his own family. The documentary’s archive lets it move between those strands without treating the fashion work and the more personal portraits as separate careers.

Taking the studio into the American West

One of Avedon’s most extensive projects began in 1979, when the Carter museum in Fort Worth, Texas, commissioned him to photograph the American West. The museum says he traveled for six years through 189 towns in 17 states, making portraits of people he encountered. The resulting photographs were published and exhibited in 1985. They became known as In the American West.

The project brought Avedon’s close attention to faces and posture to people whose jobs or lives were not routinely the subject of major fashion publications. The museum’s later exhibition revisiting the project used photographs by Laura Wilson, who traveled with Avedon, as well as materials from the original installation. Those records, like the production footage used in Howard’s film, let viewers see some of the choices that preceded a finished print.

What the archive adds to Howard’s film

Howard told Netflix that the archive and interviews allowed the filmmakers to explore the person behind photographs that audiences may already recognize. The production account identifies Imagine Documentaries and Fifth Season as producers in association with the Avedon Foundation. The interviews and footage offer evidence of how the photographer worked with other people. They cannot reproduce every decision that went into a sitting or establish how each subject felt about the image that resulted.

Reviewers have differed over how far the film moves beyond admiration. The Times critic praised Howard’s account of Avedon’s work and pointed viewers to the earlier documentary Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light as a companion. In a separate review, critic Rendy Jones credited Howard with making the archival material compelling but argued that the film did not fully examine some of the photographer’s more difficult qualities. That difference is about how the footage is framed, rather than a disagreement over the importance of the photographs.

A career that did not fit one format

Avedon also put photographs into books, including Nothing Personal, published in 1964 with an essay by Baldwin, and Observations, published in 1959 with an essay by Truman Capote. The foundation history records museum retrospectives as well as a final New Yorker assignment on which he was working when he died in San Antonio in 2004. That assignment, titled Democracy according to the Times account, continued his work on public life at the end of his career. Those projects moved his photographs from magazine pages into books, galleries and larger essays about American life.

The streaming release gives viewers access to a different record of that work. A print can show the face or gesture Avedon chose to preserve. Film footage and later testimony can show some of the interaction before that moment and the decisions after it. Howard’s documentary brings those materials together, leaving viewers to compare what the archive reveals with what the photographs still leave open.