Richard Avedon’s complex portrait of ageing in a disposable society

Everyone wants to live forever, but nobody wants to get old. In a culture that often insists on ​“correcting” nature – be it through cosmetic surgery or photographic retouching, ageing is often stripped of its beauty and recast as tragic decay. 

During his lifetime, photographer Richard Avedon (1923−2004) did just the opposite. He poured over every last inch of flesh and bone, mapping a topography of existence that has lived to see a thousand moons with the eye of an artist who refused to look away. Throughout his career he made portraits of power and prestige for legacy media, flattering none, yet inscribing mythos one silver gelatin print at a time. 

With the publication of Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951 – 2004 (Phaidon), the book’s editor Paul Roth, Director of The Image Centre in Toronto, crafts an incisive look at Avedon’s lifelong fascination with the inevitable effects of time, liberated from notions of beauty and refinement. Published in advance of a major exhibition in 2026, the catalogue brings together 100 portraits of artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, politicians, power brokers and matriarchs, including Patti Smith, Marcel Duchamp, Truman Capote, Ronald Reagan, and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. 

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“Richard Avedon very rarely spoke about his motivations,” says Roth. ​“He never had any patience for the idea that he was revealing something about people. He felt that people don’t have interior lives that can be captured on the surface of their face. He wanted to make pictures that expressed a style that had never been seen. It was a way for him to work out his own thoughts, preoccupations, obsessions, fears, and excitements.” 

Avedon let the camera mirror, confront, and subvert our anxieties and expectations without ever saying a word. Take his portrait of Coco Chanel, who seems to have lived into her prophecy: ​“Nature gives you the face you have at 20. Life shapes the face you have at 30. But at 50 you get the face you deserve.” At age 74, she stood before Avedon, her bejewelled head thrust back, wisened neck fully exposed, painted lips pursed as though she, like a cobra, might just spit. 

“Richard Avedon hated ageing,” Adam Gopnik writes in an essay for the book, setting the stage for conflicts unearthed and unresolved, entangling us in the eternal quest for understanding that is Immortal. There are those who wear it well, like writer Toni Morrison, and those who do not, like notorious Alabama governor George Wallace. ​“Avedon often spoke about the portrait as a performance that he was directing,” says Roth. ​“He’s a photographer, but he’s also a playwright and a theatrical director at the same time, trying to coax a performance out of the person.” 

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Perhaps most memorable are the photographs of his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, whose precipitous decline was documented with tender grace. They were hung at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in a small alcove off the main lobby in 1974. Larger than life, the portraits were at once intimate and intense, distressing critics while beguiling the public. ​“Avedon was consciously making portraits of his father between 1968 and 1973, when he passed, and I think that made him think about ageing in a different way,” says Roth. ​“I’ve heard people describe it as a miniature chapel, a holy space, where you were standing in this room and this person looking back at you.” 

Half a century later, Avedon’s portraits of his father remain radical, provocative and profound – the questions they proffer all the more resonant now.

Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging is published by Phaidon. Photographs by Richard Avedon, edited by Paul Roth, with contributions from Vince Aletti and Gaëll Morel anticipates a major exhibition of the same name, curated by Paul Roth, opening in February 2026 at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts and in September 2026 at The Image Centre in Toronto.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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