Richard Avedon Immortel: Portraits du temps qui passe, 1951-2004, Phaidon

An unflinching exploration of aging from one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers

‘[Avedon’s] portraits … expose something more than skin deep; whole worlds are contained in these well-earned crags and crevices.’ –The New York Times

For more than half a century, Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of the people he photographed. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through to the twenty-first century, Avedon routinely and audaciously broke the rule of flattering public personalities in his portraits. Instead, he chose to highlight the onslaught of what he called the “avalanche of age,” dramatizing the universal experience of getting older.

Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Immortal is the first book to delve into Avedon’s unflinching representation of aging throughout his career.

This elegant hardcover volume features nearly 100 portraits of cultural luminaries, each printed in striking tritone, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, and Stephen Sondheim, as well as one of Avedon’s last self-portraits. Texts by a star-studded cohort of authors, including Vince Aletti, Adam Gopnik, Paul Roth, and Gaëlle Morel, shed new light on an under-represented element of Avedon’s practice.

Thoughtfully edited and beautifully produced, Immortal testifies emphatically to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality.

Richard Avedon (1923–2004) was one of the most influential and best-known photographers of the second half of the 20th century.

Paul Roth is Director of The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Adam Gopnik is an essayist and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1986.

Vince Aletti is a critic and curator.

Gaëlle Morel is Exhibitions Curator of The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Richard Avedon Immortel: Portraits du temps qui passe, 1951-2004. Phaidon, October 2025.