🔗 Share this article

The photographer Avedon disliked ageing – but he navigated it, joked regarding it, viewed it piteously as well as, most importantly, accepting its inevitability. “I’m getting on,” he often remarked when still a youngish man as a senior. Over his professional life, he produced a vast portfolio of the consequences of ageing upon people's faces, and its unavoidable nature. For someone initially, and possibly in popular thought still, best known for images of youth and beauty, vitality and joy – a model dancing in a skirt, leaping over a puddle, enjoying arcade games late at night in Paris – a comparable amount is present of his artistic output focused on the old and wizened and wise.

The Complexity of Character

His companions frequently remarked that he was the most vibrant figure there – yet he had no desire to be the youngest person in the room. It was, though not quite offensive, a triviality: what he desired was to become the most complex individual present. He cherished blended sentiments and paradox within a single image, or subject, rather than a grouping on the extremes of feeling. He admired pictures such as the renowned da Vinci artwork that places side by side the outline of an attractive adolescent with a senior with a pronounced chin. Therefore, in a beautiful pairing of portraits of movie directors, initially it appears the belligerent John Ford pitted against the kindly Jean Renoir. Ford's sneering mouth and showy, furious eye covering – such a covering appears hostile in its persistence on making you aware of the absent orb – seen against the kind, philosophical look by Renoir, who appears initially as a wise French creative saint akin to the artist Braque.

Yet, examine a second time, and Ford and Renoir are equally belligerent and benevolent, the boxer-like snarl on their faces contrasting with the light in their gaze, and Renoir's uneven stare is equally shrewd as it is saintly. Ford might be challenging us (very Americanly), yet Renoir is assessing us. The easy complementary cliches of humanism are either subverted or enriched: men do not become movie directors by kindness exclusively. Drive, skill and intention are portrayed here too.

A Battle With Stereotypes

The photographer battled with the cliches of portraiture, involving stereotypes of growing old, and all that felt either merely pious or too picturesque irritated him. Opposition fueled his creative work. It was difficult sometimes for those he photographed to accept that he was not belittling them or betraying them when he told them that he appreciated what they were hiding just like what they proudly showed. This was a key factor The photographer had trouble, and couldn't completely achieve, in confronting his own ageing self – sometimes portraying himself as overly furious in a manner that didn't suit him, or alternatively too rigid in an approach that was too introverted, maybe due to the fact that the essential paradox within his own personality remained unseen by him as his subjects’ were to them. The sorcerer could perform spells for his subjects but not for himself.

The genuine opposition in his nature – between the serious and austere scholar of human achievement that he represented and the ambitious, hypercompetitive force inside the New York scene he was often accused of being – remained hidden from him, as our real contradictions are to all of us. A film from his later years showed him moonily walking the bluffs in Montauk outside his house, lost in thought – a place in fact he never went, staying indoors communicating via phone with associates, counseling, comforting, strategising, delighting.

Authentic Foci

The old men and women who understood how to be two things at once – or additional facets beyond that – served as his genuine subjects, and his talent for somehow conveying their multiple identities in a radically compressed and outwardly concise single image remains breathtaking, unique in the history of portraiture. He is often at his best with the most challenging subjects: the bigoted Ezra Pound screams with existential agony, and the Windsor royal couple become a frightened anxious duo reminiscent of Beckett characters. Even individuals he held in high regard were complimented by his eye for their imbalances: Stravinsky looks at us with a direct look that seems nearly afflicted and calculating, as well as a gruff creative master and an individual of strategy and drive, an artistic master and a businessman.

The poet seems like a wise sage, countenance showing concern, and a mute humorist taking a clumsy stroll, a traveler in downtown New York with house shoes on in the snow. (“I awakened to snowfall, and I desired to photograph Auden in it Dick explained once, and he telephoned the probably puzzled but compliant writer and requested to photograph him.) His portrait of his old friend the author Truman Capote depicts him as far more intelligent than he pretended to be and darker than he confessed. Regarding the older Dorothy Parker, He continued to value her essence for her face becoming less “beautiful”, and, accurately noting her deterioration, he emphasized her bravery.

Neglected Images

An image I once missed shows Harold Arlen, the renowned composer who married blues and jazz with Broadway tunes. He was part of a class of men {whom Avedon understood unconditionally|that A