Richard Avedon had only taken a couple of frames when he accidentally hit his head on a light being held above him. The Dalai Lama burst into laughter. That was when Avedon snapped two more frames and announced: “Oh, I got it!”

Avedon’s assistant, Sebastian Kim, was baffled. “I was like, what the hell happened? There’s only four frames out of a roll of 12 frames,” he recalls in a phone interview. “I realised he knew at that moment that something had happened, a mistake had happened: he hit his head and the Dalai Lama lit up.”

Kim, 52, now an eminent photographer in his own right, is among the interviewees who feature in a new documentary, Avedon, directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard, which premiered at the Cannes film festival and is released on Netflix this week.

The film explores the six-decade career of the fashion and portrait photographer renowned for white backgrounds that stripped away distractions and for capturing figures ranging from Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin to civil rights activists, anti-war protesters and working-class Americans.

Avedon was raised in New York City. His father, Jacob Avedon, co-founded a specialty store on Fifth Avenue, which was lost overnight during the Great Depression. Avedon struggled academically, flunking out of high school despite winning a citywide poetry prize.

He once said: “My father wanted me to be strongly educated, strong physically, and to make a living. But I always felt that I flunked. I grew up thinking I was certifiably stupid. I couldn’t graduate high school. I flunked everything.”

In the second world war, Avedon joined the Merchant Marine. Assigned to the photographic unit, he took more than 100,000 ID card photos and performed autopsy documentation. Observing endless faces against white backdrops taught him that no two faces are alike.

At the New School’s Design Laboratory, Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch provided Avedon’s foundational philosophy: “Astonish me.” When Avedon struggled to design a neon sign using traditional media, Brodovitch suggested using pipe cleaners or spaghetti, teaching Avedon never to be blocked by technical limitations.

Commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar magazine, Avedon brought theatricality to fashion. Observing Christian Dior’s 1947 The New Look collection, Avedon captured models moving, swirling and laughing across Paris streets, transforming fashion photography from static posing into dynamic visual storytelling.

His approach to portraiture was no less distinctive. Avedon’s studio aesthetic relied on a stark, seamless white paper backdrop, bounded by a bold black film border. He once explained: “It’s the existential white. The only thing you see is the geography of the face. One of the functions of art is to eliminate in order to make more powerful or stronger what the artist wants to get across.

“I remember once that I fasted for three days. I fasted with a friend. And she and I decided after the fast, how will we break the fast? We decided on a peach. I never tasted anything like that peach in my life. Because everything, because of the fast, becomes so precious. That’s a little bit about getting rid of the background.”

For his picture of Monroe in 1957, Avedon waited through hours of joyful posing until the actor collapsed into quiet exhaustion. Monroe slumped into a corner, allowing Avedon to capture her unguarded melancholy – a portrait often called Sad Marilyn.

He believed that models were active creative collaborators rather than decorative props. He once said: “I know perfectly well what I want before I leave the house in the morning but if the girl doesn’t feel that she’s part of it, if she feels that she is someone that’s hired for an hour, a stick of wood that’s going to be told to stand over there and do that, that’s exactly what you get out of her.”

By engaging sitters through conversation, music and playfulness, he created an atmosphere of mutual trust. Models like Penelope Tree and Lauren Hutton recall in the film that working with him was liberating, allowing them to drop their guards and express vulnerability in front of the lens.

Dallas Brennan Rexer, 54, one of the film’s producers, said: “He was trying to get into their head and into their soul, in a way, through his photos. It was the same process for him regardless, and the models that we interviewed spoke about how they weren’t treated as a model who was just there to hold the clothes on.

“They were a human that he connected to and he asked them questions and he tried to understand what they were thinking about and what they were feeling and tried to help get something out of them that radiated and gave them an energy. That’s what made the photos special. It wasn’t just that they were pretty and their clothing looked nice.”

Avedon photographed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in their hotel suite. Aware of their polished public persona, he broke through their guard by claiming his taxi had run over a dog.

Rexer elaborates: “He knew how he felt about their politics and he didn’t want to allow himself to be used to make another polite pretty picture of them. He wanted to say something much more pointed and important. He used the photograph in a very clever and specific way. He captured the moment that he thinks said everything that needed to be said about them.”

Though Avedon achieved commercial success – directing television campaigns for Calvin Klein – he channelled his resources into politically charged documentary work.

In 1963, Avedon reconnected with his high school friend James Baldwin, with whom he had co-edited a school magazine. Together they published Nothing Personal, combining Avedon’s portraits of civil rights leaders and mental asylum patients with Baldwin’s rich prose.

Rexer explains: “Dick was at a place in his life where he was ready to get involved in something political and he wanted to do something meaningful on civil rights. Nothing Personal is a phenomenal book. The text that James Baldwin wrote is poetic and beautiful, but it also is so resonant today.”

Avedon’s asylum photographs were deeply personal, influenced by his sister Louise, who suffered from severe mental illness. He said: “I photographed things that frightened me so that I could understand them.”

But when Nothing Personal received a withering review in the New York Review of Books, Avedon was crushed. He admitted: “That review simply stopped me from working for about a year because I began to question myself as an artist.”

Yet Avedon continued his political involvement. During the civil rights movement, he quietly supported activists. Rexer notes: “In the background very quietly, Dick was sending film down to SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] because they were using photography to keep people accountable to what was going on in the south. Then they would send the film back, and he would take it to the lab and process it for them, quietly on the side to just keep the movement going.”

These efforts culminated in In the American West (1979–1984), commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Over five summers, Avedon photographed working-class Americans against white paper. Avedon stated of the project: “I’m looking for faces which surprise me. I’m looking for a face that will hold the wall.”

In 1992, at age 69, Avedon became the first staff photographer in the history of the New Yorker magazine, hired by editor Tina Brown. He produced portraits of global figures and controversial fashion essays, such as the Mr and Mrs Comfort portfolio.

In a statement provided by Netflix, Howard observed: “He had to learn to bridge his commercial success and his creative endeavors, using his own resources to underwrite far riskier projects. He figured out how to lean into the popular to make space for the unusual ... In many ways, Avedon defied the idea that there must be a division between art and commerce, highbrow and lowbrow, beauty and brutality.”

Avedon’s internal contradictions are at the heart of Howard’s documentary, which draws from unprecedented access to personal archives held by the Richard Avedon Foundation, including hundreds of thousands of negatives, contact sheets and behind-the-lens footage.

Rexer says: “The archive is daunting at first because there were 16,000 sittings, and that can only mean hundreds of thousands of images, and so it’s a bit overwhelming in the first couple of months.”

Among the production team’s most extraordinary discoveries was a cache of casual audio tapes recorded inside Avedon’s studio during the 1960s and 1970s with collaborators like Marvin Israel and Doon Arbus.

Rexer says: “They would put a recorder on the table and hit record and forget about it. So you could be a fly on the wall. He was working out a lot of questions about truth and identity and self and all of the big things like beauty. They would have these wonderful lunches with these abstract conversations about it but then he could turn that into something concrete.”

Despite all the success, the workaholic Avedon lived in a constant state of anxiety and self-doubt. His son, John Avedon, says in the film: “He had a bull-like confidence in himself. At the same time, he was totally insecure. He absolutely suffered from performance anxiety, but then he absolutely performed. I think he had to be anxious in order to perform.”

For Rexer, this is the key to unlocking much of Avedon’s work. She explains: “You need to have the confidence to walk up to Henry Kissinger and say: ‘I’m taking your portrait right now and no, we’re going to do it this way and put your hands down and look into my lens.’

“But also the insecurity or the lack of know-it-allness to be able to ask questions and connect with his subjects and explore and make people feel comfortable too. It didn’t just come in big in the room. He made space for the people he was photographing. That’s beautiful.”

Avedon suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in 2004, aged 81, while in San Antonio shooting a project titled Democracy for the New Yorker.

For Kim, his influence remains profound. He says: “I credit him for making me the person that I am. The way that he shaped the person that I am, the photographer that I am. He has had such an impact on so many people. It was difficult, but I look back and it’s the discipline that creates character.”

• Avedon is available on Netflix on 11 November