Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004
September 9–December 5, 2026
Main Gallery & University Gallery
Curated by Paul Roth
For nearly half a century, American portraitist and fashion photographer Richard Avedon routinely represented advancing age in the faces of many of his subjects: from artists and writers to politicians and performers, to the citizen-subjects of his best-known series, In the American West. Taken together, these portraits dramatized the universal experience of aging and testified unflinchingly to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality. Few artists have so consistently, or controversially, represented aging as Avedon, who explored this taboo subject throughout his career as America’s most influential portrait photographer.
From Avedon’s earliest years at America’s pre-eminent fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, the standard practice for editorial portraitists was to represent public personalities in a way that flattered them by means of favorable poses and angles; bounced or diffused light; special lenses and filters that softened facial features; and post-photography retouching to smooth the skin’s appearance. Avedon, however, routinely and audaciously violated these tenets, highlighting infirmities, wrinkles, crow’s feet, rheumy eyes, and liver spots—the outward markers of what he once called “the avalanche of age,” falling over the human face and body. By comparison with predecessors like Edward Steichen, and peers such as Irving Penn, Avedon’s portraits were considered scandalous for their emphasis on aging. In reality, far from being hostile to his subjects, Avedon most often depicted people with heightened empathy for the struggles they weathered in the crucible of life: the battles they survived, the lessons learned over time, and the resilience necessary to endure. Early in his career he characterized some of his most controversial such portraits as “sermons on bravado.”
While Immortal includes portraits from throughout Avedon’s career, his celebrated series Jacob Israel Avedon (1969–1973) sits at the heart of the exhibition and accompanying catalog. Chronicling his elderly father’s last years in a sequence of just nine memorable portraits, Avedon traced his passage toward death from cancer. These photographs, first displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1974, were heralded by many as Avedon’s masterpiece, but condemned by others as exploitative and even cruel. Author Owen Edwards memorably reviewed the show as “unbearably powerful…[these] are not serene studies of an old saint waiting for his ride to paradise. Rather, they are visual metaphors for the cosmic unfairness of death, coming along, as it does, full of disdain for all the sweat and pain of survival.”
Opening at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in February 2026, and then at The Image Centre in September 2026, Immortal features approximately 90 portraits dating from the early 1950s until the photographer’s death in 2004. A richly-illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition, published by Phaidon.
Organized by The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Related Events
Immortal Book Signing with Paul Roth
Saturday, November 29, 2025
2–5pm
Stephen Bulger Gallery
1356 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Richard Avedon, Gloria Swanson, actor, New York, September 4, 1980, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Richard Avedon, Samuel Beckett, writer, Paris, April 13, 1979, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Biographies
Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon (1923–2004) was a defining figure in postwar American photography. A New Yorker by birth, he joined Harper’s Bazaar after World War II, where his kinetic fashion images redefined the genre. There, and later at Vogue, he consolidated his reputation as the leading fashion photographer of his generation. In parallel to his editorial work, Avedon’s studio produced brand-defining advertising campaigns for Revlon, Calvin Klein, and Versace, among dozens of other companies. Avedon was also a celebrated portraitist, producing intimate, often confrontational images that appeared in major magazines. Many were exhibited in museums around the world and published in such influential books as Observations (1959), Nothing Personal (1964), In the American West (1985), and The Sixties (1999). In 1992, Avedon became The New Yorker’s first staff photographer, introducing a new visual identity for the magazine. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while on assignment for the magazine, and died in San Antonio, Texas, in October 2004.
Paul Roth
Paul Roth is Director of The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. Previously, he served as Executive Director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York; as Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; and as archivist of the Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Since 1990, Roth has organized (or helped organize) more than 100 museum exhibitions and film programs. A leading authority on the life and work of Richard Avedon, Roth edited and co-authored Richard Avedon: Immortal, Portraits of Aging 1951-2004 (Phaidon, 2025), as well as Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (Steidl, 2008), and contributed an essay to Richard Avedon: Murals and Portraits (Gagosian, 2012). Roth is also co-author of numerous books about American photographer Gordon Parks, including Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story (2018) and Gordon Parks: Collected Works (2012).
Exhibition Catalogue
Richard Avedon Immortals: Portraits of Aging (1951-2004) (front and back covers), 2025 © Phaidon
Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004
Photographs by Richard Avedon. Edited by Paul Roth, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik and contributions from Vince Aletti and Gaëlle Morel
An unflinching exploration of aging from one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers
For more than half a century, Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of the people he photographed. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through to the twenty-first century, Avedon routinely and audaciously broke the rule of flattering public personalities in his portraits. Instead, he chose to highlight the onslaught of what he called the “avalanche of age,” dramatizing the universal experience of getting older.
Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Immortal is the first book to delve into Avedon’s unflinching representation of aging throughout his career.
This elegant hardcover volume features nearly 100 portraits of cultural luminaries, each printed in striking tritone, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, and Stephen Sondheim, as well as one of Avedon’s last self-portraits. Texts by a star-studded cohort of authors, including Vince Aletti, Adam Gopnik, Paul Roth, and Gaëlle Morel, shed new light on an under-represented element of Avedon’s practice.
Thoughtfully edited and beautifully produced, Immortal testifies emphatically to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality.
