In the 1940s and 1950s, when Hollywood movies were increasingly made in color rather than black and white, the original crop of cinematographers who had been making films since the 20s struggled with the shift. These veterans had developed their skills thinking and seeing purely in terms of light and shadow, and found color clumsy and unsubtle. In many ways, Richard Avedon was the direct successor of these men, a photographer who had an incredible eye for capturing an image in black and white, as well as the knack for bringing out surprising aspects of a subject’s personality. Avedon made his mark initially as a fashion photographer and worked as Vogue’s lead photographer until 1988, but is maybe best known as a portrait photographer. Now over half a century of the late artist’s work is on show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the show Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946 – 2004, a selection of pictures from Avedon’s massive body that includes shots of both Marilyn Monroe (taken in 1955) and Björk (from just before Avedon’s death in 2004). Also on show from September 8 is Helen Whitney’s 1996 documentary, Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light.