Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004

September 9–December 5, 2026
Main Gallery & University Gallery
Curator: Paul Roth

For nearly half a century, celebrated American photographer Richard Avedon confronted one of portraiture’s enduring taboos: aging. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon broke with the conventions of idealized celebrity portraiture, revealing the marks of time on his subjects’ faces with unsparing clarity. Bringing together nearly 100 portraits made between the early 1950s and 2004, the exhibition features artists, writers, musicians, and cultural icons including Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Duke Ellington, Ronald Reagan, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Patti Smith, Truman Capote, and the Dalai Lama. Immortal also includes a restaging of Avedon’s seminal 1974 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Jacob Israel Avedon, which chronicled his father’s final years in nine extraordinary portraits. Taken as a whole, the photographs reveal a lesser-known dimension of Avedon’s practice and offer an unprecedented exploration of aging through his distinctive vision.

Related Events

Opening Reception
Wednesday, September 9
6–8 pm

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Organized by The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Foreign Cultural Objects Immunity from Seizure

Generous lead sponsorship for RICHARD AVEDON: IMMORTAL is provided by Florence Minz. The show is made possible by Exhibition Sponsors Hatch and Home Equity Bank. Additional contributions provided by our Supporting Sponsors: Extendicare, Anju Virmani, the Bulmash-Siegel Private Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Our Media Sponsors are Toronto Star and ZoomerMedia.

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Richard Avedon, Gloria Swanson, actor, New York, September 4, 1980, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation

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Richard Avedon, Samuel Beckett, writer, Paris, April 13, 1979, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation

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Richard Avedon, William Casby, born into slavery, Algiers, Louisiana, March 24, 1963, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation

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Richard Avedon, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Waldorf Astoria, suite 28A, New York, April 16, 1957, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation

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Richard Avedon, Ezra Pound, poet, at the home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey, June 30, 1958, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy of Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona. Richard Avedon Archive, Gift of the Artist

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Richard Avedon, Louise Nevelson, sculptor, New York, May 13, 1975, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation

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Richard Avedon, Toni Morrison, writer, New York, September 10, 2003, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation

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Richard Avedon, Jacob Israel Avedon, father of Richard Avedon, Sarasota, Florida, October 7, 1969, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Committee on Photography Fund

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 Immortal: Portraits of Aging (1951-2004) (front and back covers), 2025 © Phaidon — Fig.
*Richard Avedon Immortal: 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.

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