Dick Hickock, Murderer,
Garden City, Kansas,
April 15, 1960
Portrait of Dick Hickock
“Richard Avedon photographed Richard Hickock as the latter
awaited trial for the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas — a
crime that netted Hickock and his accomplice forty dollars and a portable
radio. The minimal, straightforward style of the photograph highlights the
idiosyncrasies of the killer’s face and suggests that the photographer is
looking for evidence, should it exist, of a homicidal pathology. At the time
the picture was made, the country was gripped by the details of this apparently
motiveless crime. In 1965 Truman Capote published In Cold Blood, his nonfiction
novel about the Holcomb murders. Capote’s look into the heart of rural 1950s America
had a disturbing documentary clarity not unlike Avedon’s portrait of Hickock.”—Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
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