The Good, the Darker Side and the Graceful: How the Great Photographer Avedon Captured Ageing

Richard Avedon despised growing old – but he existed amidst it, laughed about it, viewed it piteously and, above all else, with resignation. “I’m getting on,” he often remarked when still a youngish man in his 60s. Over his professional life, he created countless photographs of the consequences of ageing on facial features, and its unavoidable nature. For someone initially, and perhaps in the world’s imagination even now, primarily linked to pictures of the young and beautiful, vitality and joy – a model dancing in a skirt, leaping over a puddle, playing pinball in Paris at midnight – an equal portion exists of his artistic output focused on the aged, wrinkled, and knowledgeable.

The Nuance within Personalities

His companions frequently remarked that he appeared as the youngest person in the room – but he didn’t want to be seen as the most juvenile. That represented, though not quite offensive, a triviality: what Dick wanted was to stand as the most multifaceted figure there. He cherished mixed emotions and paradox within a single image, or model, more than a clumping at the poles of sentiment. He admired pictures comparable to the celebrated Leonardo piece which contrasts the silhouette of a handsome young man with an elderly man having a strong jaw. Thus, in a striking combination of images depicting cinematic auteurs, initially one might perceive the combative Ford contrasted with the benevolent Jean Renoir. Ford’s curled lip and showy, angry eye patch – such a covering appears hostile in its determination on ensuring you notice of the loss of the eye – observed in contrast to the soft, compassionate gaze from Renoir, who at first glance like a sage French artist-saint akin to Georges Braque.

Yet, examine a second time, and both Ford and Renoir show matching combativeness and compassion, the fighter's twist of their mouths contradicting the warmth in their look, and Renoir's uneven stare is just as strategic as it is saintly. The American director could be intimidating us (in a typically American way), yet Renoir is assessing us. The easy complementary cliches of humanism are either contradicted or enhanced: people aren't made into filmmakers through mere friendliness. Ambition, skill and purpose are equally represented.

A Battle Against Cliches

Avedon fought with photographic conventions, including the cliches of ageing, and anything that seemed just sanctimonious or overly idealized offended him. Paradox fueled his creative work. At times, it proved hard for his subjects to trust that he was not belittling them or betraying them when he expressed to them that he held in esteem what they were hiding equally to their openly displayed traits. This was a key factor Avedon found it difficult, and never entirely succeeded, in addressing his personal process of growing old – either making himself look too angry in a manner that didn't suit him, or alternatively too rigid in a way that was too self-enclosed, possibly since the vital contradiction within his own personality was just as hidden from him as his models' were to themselves. The sorcerer could perform spells for his subjects but not himself.

The real contradiction within his personality – from the solemn and strict student of human accomplishment he embodied and the driven, hypercompetitive force in New York City he was often accused of being – remained hidden from him, just as our own paradoxes escape us. A film from his later years depicted him dreamily strolling the Montauk cliffs by his residence, absorbed in reflection – a location he actually never visited, staying indoors talking on the phone to companions, counseling, consoling, strategising, delighting.

Genuine Muses

The elderly individuals who knew how of existing in two states simultaneously – or even more things than that – served as his genuine subjects, and his ability for somehow conveying their varied personas in an extremely condensed and seemingly laconic solitary photograph remains breathtaking, unique in the history of portraiture. His peak performance often occurs when facing difficult individuals: the antisemite Ezra Pound cries out from the anguish of existence, and the Windsor royal couple become a frightened anxious duo reminiscent of Beckett characters. Even those he respected were elevated by his perspective for their imbalances: Stravinsky gazes toward us with a direct look that is almost stricken and calculating, both a man of surly genius and a man of calculation and ambition, a brilliant mind and a tradesman.

The poet seems like a wise sage, visage marked by worry, and a silent comedian on an ungainly walk, a traveler in downtown New York wearing slippers in snowy conditions. (“I arose to see snow falling, and I wished to capture Auden amidst it,” Dick explained once, and he telephoned the likely confused yet agreeable poet and asked to take his picture.) His portrait of his old friend the writer Capote shows him as considerably brighter than he pretended to be and darker than he confessed. In the case of senior Dorothy Parker, He continued to value her essence for her face becoming less “beautiful”, and, registering accurately her decline, he italicised her courage.

Lesser-Known Photographs

An image I once missed is the one featuring Harold Arlen, the celebrated music writer who blended blues with jazz with Broadway tunes. He was part of a class of men {whom Avedon understood unconditionally|that A