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Richard Avedon despised growing old – but he existed amidst it, found humor in it, saw it with pity as well as, primarily, accepting its inevitability. “I’m a geezer,” he often remarked while relatively young in his 60s. During his artistic journey, he created countless photographs of aging's effects on the human face, and of its inevitability. For an artist initially, and maybe in the world’s imagination even now, primarily linked to pictures of the young and beautiful, liveliness and delight – the girl swirling her skirt, jumping across water, playing pinball in Paris at midnight – a comparable amount is present of his oeuvre focused on the aged, wrinkled, and knowledgeable.

The Intricacy in Human Nature

His companions always said that he appeared as the most vibrant figure there – however, he resisted to be the youngest person in the room. This was, if not exactly an insult, a triviality: what Avedon sought was to stand as the most complicated person in the room. He loved contrasting feelings and contradiction inside a solitary portrait, or model, rather than a grouping at the poles of sentiment. He loved images like the famous Leonardo da Vinci which contrasts the profile of a beautiful youth with an elderly man having a strong jaw. And so, in an elegant duo of photographs featuring filmmakers, at first we may see the aggressive John Ford set against the benevolent Jean Renoir. The director's twisted smirk and ostentatious, angry eye patch – a patch can seem aggressive in its persistence on forcing your recognition of the missing eye – seen against the kind, philosophical look of Renoir, who seems at first as a wise French creative saint comparable to Georges Braque.

But look again, and both Ford and Renoir display both aggression and kindness, the boxer-like snarl on their faces contradicting the light in their gaze, and Renoir’s asymmetrical gaze is just as strategic as it is virtuous. Ford may be staring us down (with an American attitude), yet Renoir is assessing us. The straightforward, matching tropes about humanistic ideals are either contradicted or enhanced: individuals don't achieve directorial status by geniality alone. Ambition, technique and intention are equally represented.

A War With Stereotypes

Avedon was at war with the cliches of portraiture, involving stereotypes of growing old, and anything that seemed just sanctimonious or overly idealized displeased him. Contradiction 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 informed them that he appreciated what they were hiding as much as what they proudly showed. This explained partly Avedon found it difficult, and didn't fully succeed, in confronting his own aging persona – sometimes portraying himself as overly furious in a manner that didn't suit him, or alternatively too rigid in a way that was too self-enclosed, perhaps because the crucial opposition within his own personality was as invisible to him as his subjects’ were to them. The magician could work magic on others but not himself.

The true paradox within his personality – contrasting the earnest and severe observer of people's successes he embodied and the ambitious, fiercely ambitious energy in New York City he was often accused of being – was invisible to him, just as our own paradoxes escape us. A documentary made near the end of his life showed him moonily walking the cliffs of Montauk outside his house, deep in contemplation – a spot he truly didn't frequent, remaining inside on the telephone with friends, advising, soothing, devising strategies, enjoying.

True Subjects

The senior figures who had mastered the art of existing in two states simultaneously – or even more things than that – served as his genuine subjects, and his ability for somehow conveying their multiple identities in an extremely condensed and apparently brief solitary photograph continues to astonish, unique in the history of portraiture. He frequently excels with the worst: the antisemite Ezra Pound howls with the sheer pain of being, and the Windsor royal couple transform into a terrified alarmed Beckett-like pair. Even individuals he held in high regard were complimented by his eye for their inconsistencies: Stravinsky looks at us with a direct look that seems nearly afflicted and calculating, both a man of surly genius and an individual of strategy and drive, a genius and a rug merchant.

The poet seems like a wise sage, face lined with care, and a silent comedian out for an awkward flat-footed walk, a wanderer in the Lower East Side wearing slippers in snowy conditions. (“I awakened to snowfall, and I wanted to see Auden within it the photographer recounted, and he called the probably puzzled but compliant writer and sought permission to capture his image.) His photograph of his longtime companion the writer Capote presents him as much smarter than he pretended to be and eviler than he liked to admit. Regarding the older Dorothy Parker, Avedon's admiration for her character didn't diminish as her looks faded, and, truthfully documenting her decline, he italicised her courage.

Lesser-Known Photographs

One portrait that I had long overlooked shows Harold Arlen, the celebrated music writer who combined blues music with jazz with Broadway tunes. He belonged to a group of individuals {whom Avedon understood unconditionally|that A