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The photographer Avedon loathed growing old – but he navigated it, joked regarding it, saw it with pity as well as, most importantly, accepting its inevitability. “I’m an old-timer,” he would say while relatively young in his 60s. Over his professional life, he produced a vast portfolio of the consequences of ageing on facial features, and of its inevitability. For an artist initially, and perhaps in the world’s imagination even now, best known for pictures of the young and beautiful, vitality and joy – a young woman twirling her dress, jumping across water, playing pinball in Paris at midnight – there is at least as much of his oeuvre devoted to the old and wizened and wise.

The Intricacy of Character

His friends frequently remarked that he was the youngest person in the room – however, he resisted to be the youngest person in the room. It was, if not exactly an insult, a triviality: what he desired was to stand as the most complex individual present. He adored contrasting feelings and contradiction inside a solitary portrait, or model, instead of a clustering at the poles of sentiment. He was drawn to photographs like the famous Leonardo da Vinci which contrasts the silhouette of a handsome young man with a senior with a pronounced chin. Thus, in an elegant duo of images depicting cinematic auteurs, initially one might perceive the combative Ford pitted against the kindly Jean Renoir. Ford’s curled lip and flamboyant, irate ocular shield – an eye patch is angry in its insistence on making you aware of the missing eye – observed in contrast to the soft, compassionate gaze by Renoir, who appears initially similar to an enlightened Gallic artistic figure akin to the artist Braque.

Yet, examine a second time, and Ford and Renoir are equally belligerent and benevolent, the fighter's twist of their mouths opposing the light in their gaze, and Renoir’s asymmetrical gaze is just as strategic as it is virtuous. Ford may be staring us down (in a typically American way), yet Renoir is assessing us. The straightforward, matching tropes regarding humanism are betrayed or deepened: individuals don't achieve directorial status by geniality alone. Drive, craft and intention are also depicted.

A Battle Opposing Conventions

Avedon was at war against portrait stereotypes, encompassing aging tropes, and anything that seemed just sanctimonious or too picturesque irritated him. Opposition fueled his creative work. On occasion, it was challenging for those he photographed to accept that he wasn't demeaning them or betraying them when he informed them that he valued what they were hiding as much as what they proudly showed. This was a key factor The photographer had trouble, and didn't fully succeed, in confronting his personal process of growing old – sometimes portraying himself as overly furious in a manner that didn't suit him, or on the other hand too stern in a way that was too self-enclosed, possibly since the essential paradox in his personal nature remained unseen by him as his models' were to themselves. The sorcerer could perform spells for his subjects yet not on his own person.

The genuine opposition in his character – from the solemn and strict observer of people's successes that he represented and the driven, intensely competitive presence within New York he was frequently described as – remained hidden from him, similar to how we miss our own oppositions. A film from his later years presented him thoughtfully wandering the cliffs of Montauk by his residence, deep in contemplation – a place in fact he never went, staying indoors talking on the phone to companions, guiding, comforting, strategising, enjoying.

Authentic Foci

The old men and women who understood how to be two things at once – or even multiple personas – acted as his real muses, and his ability for in some way expressing their multitudinous selves in a highly concentrated and apparently brief solitary photograph remains breathtaking, exceptional in the annals of photographic portraiture. He frequently excels with the worst: the bigoted Ezra Pound screams with existential agony, and the former king and his wife become a frightened alarmed Beckett-like pair. Even individuals he held in high regard were elevated by his perspective for their asymmetries: Stravinsky looks at us with a levelled gaze that seems nearly afflicted and shrewd, simultaneously a ill-tempered genius and an individual of strategy and drive, a brilliant mind and a tradesman.

The poet seems like a wise sage, countenance showing concern, and a quiet comic taking a clumsy stroll, a traveler in downtown New York with house shoes on in the snow. (“I woke up and it was snowing, and I desired to photograph Auden in it Dick explained once, and he phoned up the presumably bemused but willing poet and requested to photograph him.) His portrait of his old friend Truman Capote shows him as much smarter than he chose to pretend and darker than he confessed. When it came to the elderly Dorothy Parker, He continued to value her essence as her looks faded, and, registering accurately her decline, he italicised her courage.

Overlooked Portraits

An image I once missed is that of Harold Arlen, the renowned composer who blended blues with jazz with Broadway tunes. He was among a category of artists {whom Avedon understood unconditionally|that A