The Good, the Bad and the Aesthetic: The Way the Renowned Photographer Avedon Documented Aging

Richard Avedon despised ageing – but he existed amidst it, found humor in it, saw it with pity as well as, most importantly, fatalistically. “I’m a geezer,” he often remarked in his earlier years as a senior. Over his professional life, he created countless photographs of aging's effects on facial features, and of its inevitability. For someone initially, and perhaps in the world’s imagination to this day, primarily linked to images of youth and beauty, vitality and joy – a young woman twirling her dress, jumping across water, playing pinball in Paris at midnight – an equal portion exists of his oeuvre devoted to the aged, wrinkled, and knowledgeable.

The Nuance of Character

His friends always said that he appeared as the youngest person in the room – yet he had no desire to hold that youthful title. That represented, if not exactly an insult, a commonplace observation: what he desired was to stand as the most multifaceted figure there. He cherished contrasting feelings and opposition within a single image, or model, instead of a clustering at either end of the emotional spectrum. He loved images such as the renowned da Vinci artwork that places side by side the profile of a beautiful youth with a nutcracker-jawed old man. And so, in a striking combination of photographs featuring filmmakers, initially one might perceive the combative Ford set against the kindly Jean Renoir. The director's twisted smirk and flamboyant, furious eye covering – a patch can seem aggressive in its determination on making you aware of the missing eye – observed in contrast to the kind, philosophical look from Renoir, who at first glance as a wise French creative saint comparable to Georges Braque.

But look again, and Ford and Renoir display both aggression and kindness, the pugilistic curl of their lips opposing the light in their gaze, and the director's unbalanced observation is equally shrewd as it is virtuous. The American director could be intimidating us (with an American attitude), yet Renoir is assessing us. The easy complementary cliches regarding humanism are either contradicted or enhanced: men do not become movie directors by geniality alone. Aspiration, technique and determination are portrayed here too.

A Battle With Stereotypes

Avedon was at war with the cliches of portraiture, including the cliches of ageing, and whatever appeared either merely pious or too picturesque offended him. Contradiction was the engine of his art. It was difficult sometimes for his subjects to trust that he was not belittling them or betraying them when he told them that he held in esteem what they were hiding just like what they proudly showed. This was one reason The photographer had trouble, and never entirely succeeded, in addressing his own ageing self – either making himself look too angry in a way that was entirely uncharacteristic, or alternatively too rigid in a style that was too isolated, possibly since the crucial opposition in his personal nature remained unseen by him as those he photographed experienced. The wizard could create wonders for his subjects but not for himself.

The genuine opposition in his nature – contrasting the earnest and severe observer of people's successes he was and the driven, hypercompetitive force within New York people often labeled him – remained hidden from him, just as our own paradoxes escape us. A documentary made near the end of his life depicted him dreamily strolling the cliffs of Montauk outside his house, absorbed in reflection – a spot he truly didn't frequent, staying indoors talking on the phone to companions, advising, soothing, strategising, enjoying.

Authentic Foci

The elderly individuals who knew how of existing in two states simultaneously – or even more things than that – were his true subjects, and his gift for managing to communicate their multitudinous selves in a radically compressed and seemingly laconic solitary photograph remains breathtaking, unparalleled in portrait history. He frequently excels when facing difficult individuals: the prejudiced poet Pound cries out from the anguish of existence, and the Windsor royal couple become a frightened alarmed Beckett-like pair. Even the people he admired were enhanced by his vision for their inconsistencies: The composer stares at the viewer with a levelled gaze that is almost stricken and shrewd, simultaneously a ill-tempered genius and a person with ambition and planning, a brilliant mind and a tradesman.

Auden appears as a mystical figure, countenance showing concern, and a silent comedian on an ungainly walk, a traveler in downtown New York with house shoes on in the snow. (“I awakened to snowfall, and I wanted to see Auden within it Avedon once described, and he called the likely confused yet agreeable poet and sought permission to capture his image.) His portrait of his old friend the writer Capote shows him as much smarter than he chose to pretend and eviler than he liked to admit. When it came to the elderly Dorothy Parker, Avedon did not admire her spirit less as her looks faded, and, truthfully documenting her decline, he highlighted her fortitude.

Overlooked Portraits

A photograph I previously ignored is the one featuring Harold Arlen, the renowned composer who combined blues music with jazz with Broadway tunes. He was part of a class of men {whom Avedon understood unconditionally|that A