Image: The Image Centre, Toronto
The Image Centre in Toronto will open ‘Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004’ on September 9, 2026. On view through December 5 in the South and North galleries, the exhibition brings together nearly 100 portraits made from the early 1950s to 2004, examining aging as a sustained subject in Avedon’s work.
The selection draws on portraits of artists, writers, musicians and cultural figures, including Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Duke Ellington, Ronald Reagan, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Patti Smith, Truman Capote and the Dalai Lama. Avedon’s ‘Samuel Beckett, writer, Paris, April 13, 1979’ is among the identified works, as are portraits of Morrison, Smith and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
The exhibition presents Avedon’s images against the idealized conventions of celebrity photography that he challenged from his early years at Harper’s Bazaar. Rather than smoothing over age, his portraits registered the marks of time on his subjects’ faces with “unsparing clarity.” The show’s scope makes that focus visible across a large selection of portraits produced over more than five decades.
A major component is a restaging of ‘Jacob Israel Avedon’, the photographer’s 1974 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The earlier project chronicled the final years of Avedon’s father in nine portraits. ‘Richard Avedon Immortal’ is curated by Paul Roth and organized by The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
An opening reception is scheduled for September 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. The same day, The Image Centre will also introduce a refurbished 1960s Classics Model 14 analogue photobooth operated by Four Poses.
