That “bomb blast” became the signature style with which Avedon went on to create many series of photographs, including “The Family,” 69 portraits of the most powerful and influential Americans in 1976, published in Rolling Stone for the country’s bicentennial. His 1985 book, “In the American West,” consists of portraits of anonymous workers, drifters, cowboys and random citizens made throughout the Western United States over five years, a contrast to the pantheon of accomplishment and celebrity that characterized most of Avedon’s portraiture.

In conceiving “Nothing Personal,” Avedon might have had in mind a dialogue with “The Americans,” by Robert Frank, published five years earlier — an artist’s book that struck a sober note about the story America told itself versus the realities of daily life for its citizens. At the time, “The Americans” was little known outside of New York art circles, but the book had a profound influence on photographers — including Avedon — and on the direction of photography itself. While Mr. Frank had traveled across the country to capture happened-upon moments in ordinary life, Avedon’s idiom was the portrait, with which he was equally intent on telling a deeper truth about America. Implicit in Avedon’s version was the persistent threat to our existence, something the Cuban missile crisis had brought that much closer two years before “Nothing Personal” was published. At the time, Avedon considered the portraits in the book to be “some of my very best work.”

Yet, to his surprise and chagrin, the public reaction was swift and hostile. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Robert Brustein lashed out at the book’s extravagant “snow-white covers with sterling silver titles” before excoriating the effort in his critique. (It predated by six years Tom Wolfe’s incendiary 1970 essay, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” in New York magazine — a savage takedown of New York’s intellectual circle of “limousine liberals” as conspicuous hypocrites.) “‘Nothing Personal’ pretends to be a ruthless indictment of contemporary America,” Brustein wrote, “but the people likely to buy this extravagant volume are the subscribers to fashion magazines, while the moralistic authors of the work are themselves pretty fashionable, affluent, and chic.”