The Fire Next Time
Published a year earlier, and the book that made Baldwin famous enough for a collaboration like this one to be commissioned.
Read our take
Nothing Personal
by James Baldwin, Richard Avedon
James Baldwin and the photographer Richard Avedon had been at the same Bronx high school. Thirty years later they made a book about what America looked like in 1964.
- 1964
- 104
About James Baldwin
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeA collaboration between James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, published by Atheneum in 1964 as a large slipcased volume. Avedon supplied fifty-four portraits made between 1954 and 1964; Baldwin wrote a four-part essay to run with them. The sitters range from Dwight Eisenhower and Billy Graham to Malcolm X, George Wallace, Marilyn Monroe, a naked Allen Ginsberg and William Casby, who had been born into slavery. Between them are couples marrying at City Hall, young civil rights workers, and a series made inside a Louisiana mental hospital.
The story, in more detail
The two men were classmates at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in the 1930s and worked on the school literary magazine together. Baldwin became a novelist, Avedon the most commercially successful portrait photographer in the country, and this is the only book they made.
It came out in 1964, months after the Civil Rights Act passed and less than a year after Kennedy was shot, and neither man treated the moment as an occasion for reassurance. The essay is in four parts and does not caption or explain the photographs; it runs alongside them.
Avedon's portraits are the ones people know — Monroe looking away, Casby's face filling the frame, Ginsberg with his wife — but the section that makes the book hard is the one photographed in a state hospital, printed without names.
It went out of print for decades. Taschen reproduced the whole book in 2017 with an essay by Hilton Als, and Beacon Press published Baldwin's text on its own in 2021.
Themes and analysis
Words beside photographs
In his afterword to the standalone edition, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. describes a change in his own reading: he had once treated Baldwin's words chiefly as a guide to Avedon's photographs. Reading the essay separately brings its sustained argument about loneliness, national myths and the need for love into focus. His account suggests a useful way to approach the collaboration. The prose asks for attention across its four sections, not only at the point where an image interrupts it. Moving between the two forms also means noticing what each encourages the reader to overlook.
The promise on the screen
The opening television passage begins as casual distraction, then accumulates promises that bodies and possessions can be protected from every failure. Hair, teeth, skin, cigarettes and cars crowd into the same extended sentence. Repeated assurances of permanence make ordinary aging and uncertainty seem like defects that purchases should eliminate. Meanwhile, news becomes one more small interruption within the flow of entertainment and advertising. The arrangement disturbs the scale of attention: bodily reassurance receives elaborate care, while events beyond the viewer's comfort barely register. The passage makes that imbalance felt through the pressure of its crowded catalogue.
Why we recommend it
It is a book about images, made of images
Baldwin spent his career arguing about what Americans looked like to themselves. Here the argument is printed next to fifty-four faces and has to survive the comparison.
It is very short
A four-part essay of about a hundred pages in the Beacon edition. It is the least demanding way to read late-period Baldwin.
The 1964 object is worth seeing whole
If you can find the Taschen facsimile, take it over the text-only edition. The book was designed as a single thing and the essay was written to run beside the pictures.
What this book explores
Timeline
1963
Avedon and Baldwin, classmates thirty years earlier at DeWitt Clinton High School, begin work on the book.
1964
Atheneum publishes Nothing Personal, months after the Civil Rights Act and less than a year after Kennedy's assassination.
2017
Taschen reissues the complete book with an essay by Hilton Als.
2021
Beacon Press publishes Baldwin's text alone, with a foreword by Imani Perry and an afterword by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Atheneum
- 1964
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Taschen
- 2017
- Hardcover
- Beacon Press
- 2021
- 9780807006429
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
The Devil Finds Work
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No Name in the Street
The long essay from eight years later, covering the years this book stands at the front of.
Read our takeNothing Personal: frequently asked questions
What is Nothing Personal?
A 1964 collaboration between the writer James Baldwin and the photographer Richard Avedon. Avedon contributed fifty-four portraits taken between 1954 and 1964; Baldwin wrote a four-part essay to accompany them. It was published by Atheneum as a large slipcased volume.
Who is in the photographs?
Among others: Dwight Eisenhower, Billy Graham, Malcolm X, George Wallace, Marilyn Monroe, Allen Ginsberg, and William Casby, who had been born into slavery. There are also couples being married at City Hall, young civil rights workers, and a series photographed inside a Louisiana mental hospital.
How did Baldwin and Avedon know each other?
They were classmates at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in the 1930s and worked on the school's literary magazine together. Nothing Personal is the only book they made.
Which edition should I buy?
Taschen's 2017 facsimile if you want the book as it was designed, with the photographs. Beacon Press's 2021 edition if you only want Baldwin's essay; it runs 104 pages and adds a foreword by Imani Perry and an afterword by Eddie S. Glaude Jr., but contains none of Avedon's pictures.
Is the essay collected anywhere else?
It is short and has circulated mainly through the two editions of this book. Readers who want Baldwin's non-fiction in bulk should start with The Price of the Ticket, his own selection of thirty-seven years of essays.
Where does the title come from?
It is the ordinary American phrase used to soften a refusal or a firing. Baldwin and Avedon applied it to a country, and the book is an argument about how little of what happens there is impersonal.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Nothing Personal, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1Nothing Personal
NovelJames Baldwin, Richard Avedon, 1964Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
2James Baldwin papers, 1936–1992 (Sc MG 936), finding aid
ArchiveSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public LibraryUsed forUsed to place Nothing Personal within James Baldwin's published work and verify its bibliographic context.
3Chicago Public Library — James Baldwin Biography
WebsiteUsed forUsed for independent biographical, archival, or historical context surrounding James Baldwin's career and the period in which Nothing Personal appeared.
4Baldwin in France
WebsiteNational Museum of African American History and CultureUsed forUsed to cross-check authorship, chronology, and the work's place in James Baldwin's wider catalogue.
5Baldwin, James Arthur
WebsiteThe Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford UniversityUsed forUsed to verify James Baldwin and Richard Avedon's bibliography and place Nothing Personal within the broader chronology of James Baldwin and Richard Avedon's career.
6On James Baldwin's Unflinching Exposé of American Greed and Racial Terror — afterword excerpt
WebsiteLiterary Hub / Beacon Press, 2021Used forPermission-marked excerpt of Glaude's 2021 afterword. The first analysis paragraph explicitly attributes his critical account; no complete facsimile or image-sequence inspection is claimed.
7Nothing Personal — opening passage quoted by Cole Schafer
WebsiteCole Schafer, 2021Used forPrimary opening quoted on a third-party page. The transcription contains visible errors, so no exact word count, original punctuation or edition collation is claimed. The added reading does not borrow the adjacent advertising commentary.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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