Stanford is the final venue for the 20th-anniversary tour of this exhibition of Avedon’s oversized images of working-class Westerners.

It’s almost as if you become the viewed and they become the viewers.

If you go to the Cantor Arts Center just once a year, it should be to see this show. If you go to Cantor once in your entire Stanford career, it should be to see Richard Avedon’s breath-taking photo portraits.

The moment that you round the corner and step into the exhibit, you are confronted by the intense stare of an extremely freckly, overall-wearing 12-year-old girl. Like all of the work in the show, the photograph is huge, stark, black and white and utterly unforgettable. She gazes directly at you, and you can’t help but construct a past for her, piece together her family and her friends — each picture builds a narrative and gives a life-time of details.

Richard Avedon, originally famous for helping to raise fashion photography to a fine art, was commissioned in 1979 to take portraits of those living in the American West. Thirteen states, 189 towns, 17,000 sheets of 8” by 10” film and five-and-a-half years later, Avedon exhibited the original “In the American West” exhibit in 1985 at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Now two decades later, and two years after Avedon’s death, Stanford is showing 63 of the original 124 pieces, including all of the most famous and notable portraits.

For the subject of his portraits, Avedon focused on the working class, both those living close to the land and on the margins of society. He photographed farmers, coal miners, rodeo contestants, housewives, construction workers, ranchers, truckers, waitresses, carneys and oil field workers. To find the subjects for his pieces, he visited local bars, diners and fairs across the West; he would meet them, talk to them a bit and then ask to take their portrait. Avedon photographed outside in the shade with an 8” by 10” Deardorff view camera and a simple blank sheet of paper as his backdrop. The space is shallow, the lighting simple — Avedon wanted these portraits to look as though they “merely happened.”

And he has more than succeeded. From a boy proudly holding up a gutted rattlesnake and its intestines to sisters posing next to one another, these people feel alive, standing still behind the pictures’ borders. The exhibit features a fascinating sequence of drifters who gape back from the walls, their expressions full of mystery, tragedy and knowledge. The miners in the farthest room look from blackened faces — mud, coal and other earthly substances splattered all over their bodies. There is a nine-year-old who holds a rifle, a bee-keeper covered in bees and, perhaps my favorite, three sisters with teased hair whose caption reads “Loretta, Loudilla, Kay Johnson, co-presidents, Loretta Lynn Fan Club.”

All of the photographed Westerners stare from the walls with complex expressions of alienation, despair and resilience. Upon initial exhibition of the show 20 years ago, many criticized Avedon’s portraits as “cruel,” “cynical” and even “vicious.” One critic even wrote, “This is not our West.” Although Avedon’s subjects are exclusively from rural backgrounds, and some portraits evoke sympathy and sometimes even pity, his portraits have more generally been viewed as breathtaking and poignant rather than disparaging and ridiculing. The pieces have since toured the country during multiple exhibitions and have become a hallmark of American photography.

From pregnant housewives to bartenders and waitresses, this exhibit gives us an authentic look at the West. Without make-up, outfits or props, the photos often seem bleak and harsh — the realism is startling. But it is through their honesty and our reaction to it that we can also see ourselves in a fuller and more unambiguous way.

“In the American West”

Photographs by Richard Avedon

Feb. 14 - May 6