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Richard Avedon disliked ageing – but he navigated it, joked regarding it, viewed it piteously and, most importantly, with resignation. “I’m a geezer,” he would say when still a youngish man during his sixties. Over his professional life, he produced a vast portfolio of aging's effects upon people's faces, and its unavoidable nature. For an artist initially, and maybe in popular thought even now, best known for pictures of the young and beautiful, energy and happiness – a young woman twirling her dress, skipping over a wet patch, enjoying arcade games late at night in Paris – there is at least as much of his artistic output focused on the elderly, experienced, and sagacious.

The Nuance of Character

His companions frequently remarked that he appeared as the most vibrant figure there – yet he had no desire to hold that youthful title. That represented, though not quite offensive, a commonplace observation: what Dick wanted was to become the most multifaceted figure there. He adored contrasting feelings and contradiction in one photograph, or subject, instead of a clustering on the extremes of feeling. He admired pictures like the famous Leonardo da Vinci that juxtaposes the outline of an attractive adolescent with an elderly man having a strong jaw. And so, in a striking combination of images depicting cinematic auteurs, initially one might perceive the aggressive John Ford contrasted with the gentle Renoir. Ford’s curled lip and flamboyant, furious eye covering – an eye patch is angry in its persistence on ensuring you notice of the absent orb – seen against the kind, philosophical look by Renoir, who at first glance as a wise French creative saint comparable to the painter Georges Braque.

Yet, examine a second time, and Ford and Renoir display both aggression and kindness, the boxer-like snarl on their faces contrasting with the light in their gaze, and the director's unbalanced observation is equally shrewd as it is saintly. The American director could be intimidating us (in a typically American way), but Renoir is sizing us up. The simple, opposing stereotypes of humanism are betrayed or deepened: people aren't made into filmmakers by geniality alone. Aspiration, skill and determination are also depicted.

A War Opposing Conventions

The photographer battled with photographic conventions, including the cliches of ageing, and anything that seemed just sanctimonious or overly idealized displeased him. Paradox drove his artistic process. It was difficult sometimes for his sitters to accept that he was not belittling them or being disloyal to them when he told them that he valued what they concealed just like their openly displayed traits. This was a key factor Avedon found it difficult, and didn't fully succeed, in confronting 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, perhaps because the crucial opposition within his own personality was just as hidden from him as his subjects’ were to them. The wizard could create wonders on others yet not on his own person.

The real contradiction in his nature – between the serious and austere scholar of human achievement he embodied and the aspirational, fiercely ambitious energy inside the New York scene he was frequently described as – was not apparent to him, just as our own paradoxes escape us. A late-in-life documentary showed him moonily walking the cliffs of Montauk near his home, lost in thought – a location he actually never visited, remaining inside talking on the phone to companions, advising, consoling, planning, taking pleasure.

Authentic Foci

The old men and women 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 managing to communicate their multiple identities in a highly concentrated and apparently brief one picture stays awe-inspiring, exceptional in the annals of photographic portraiture. He is often at his best with the most challenging subjects: the antisemite Ezra Pound howls with the sheer pain of being, and the former king and his wife appear as a scared anxious duo reminiscent of Beckett characters. Even those he respected were complimented by his eye for their inconsistencies: Stravinsky gazes toward us with a direct look that is almost stricken and calculating, both a man of surly genius and an individual of strategy and drive, a brilliant mind and a tradesman.

The poet seems like a wise sage, face lined with care, and a silent comedian out for an awkward flat-footed walk, a pilgrim on the Lower East Side with house shoes on in the snow. (“I awakened to snowfall, and I wished to capture Auden amidst it,” Dick explained once, and he telephoned the presumably bemused but willing poet and asked to take his picture.) His photograph of his longtime companion the writer Capote presents him as far more intelligent than he let on and darker than he confessed. In the case of senior Dorothy Parker, He continued to value her essence because her appearance grew less attractive, and, truthfully documenting her decline, he highlighted her fortitude.

Lesser-Known Photographs

An image I once missed is the one featuring Harold Arlen, the great songwriter who blended blues with jazz to Broadway melody. He was among a category of artists {whom Avedon understood unconditionally|that A