Seeing Richard Avedon undertakes a reading of the work of American media photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) through the filter of contemporary philosophy. Working primarily in the genres of fashion, celebrity and fine art portraiture, Avedon pursued a career that extended across six decades, and he participated in the invention and refinement of many of the norms of contemporary media photography.

Relying primarily on 14 books of photography and two other portfolios that Avedon created during his lifetime, this inquiry interrogates the relationship between photography and philosophy, and asks whether Avedon should properly be conceived as a philosopher. The inquiry approaches these questions by examining Avedon's practices for editing, sequencing and designing his books, and by dealing with Avedon's engagement with the cultural categories of race, class and gender. The inquiry also considers Avedon's photography and verbal discourse in the context of a variety of significant philosophers and theorists, including Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan.

Among its conclusions, the inquiry finds that Avedon participated in an ambiguous address of race and class, one that alternately valorized, visualized, subverted and annihilated racial and class categories; that his photography undermines conventional feminist applications of gaze theory, and makes the visibility of the photographer an essential attribute of his practices; and that his photography investigates the relationship between photographic representation and embodiment. The dissertation finally concludes that Avedon is a philosopher, primarily on the basis of his written discourse challenging conventional assertions of the association of photography and truth.