Netflix has released Avedon, a feature documentary about the photographer Richard Avedon, directed by Ron Howard and streaming globally from 11 November 2026. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and draws on the archive of the Richard Avedon Foundation, which holds the record of some 16,000 sittings across the photographer's career.

The documentary mixes unseen stills and behind-the-lens footage with new interviews. Among those speaking are dealer Larry Gagosian, editor Tina Brown, model Twiggy, writer Hilton Als, Harper's Bazaar editor Samira Nasr, actor Isabella Rossellini and designer Calvin Klein, alongside Avedon's son, John Avedon. The film runs one hour and 44 minutes and is produced by Brian Grazer and Dallas Brennan Rexer, among others.

Avedon, who died in 2004 aged 81, built his reputation first in fashion, where his restless, movement-filled portraits broke with the stiff studio conventions of the 1940s and 1950s. His career began far from the studio: during the Second World War he photographed more than 100,000 identification pictures for the United States Merchant Marine, an early exercise in looking closely at faces that would shape everything that followed.

The film arrives as photography's biggest names continue to find large audiences on streaming platforms, and as Avedon's own market and museum standing remain high two decades after his death. For viewers who know him only through a handful of famous portraits, the documentary offers the fuller arc, from wartime identification photographs to the celebrity sittings that defined an era of magazine portraiture.