The Image Center
Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging
O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin,
And wonder what you’ve missed.
This is a famous stanza from a poem by W.H. Auden. The poem, titled “As I Walked Out One Evening” was written in 1937. Richard Avedon’s portrait of W.H. Auden, taken in 1960, has a candid look. It shows the poet staring intently, on a busy sidewalk, as snow falls.
It’s a really great poem: all about the relentless power of time and how we have to embrace life while we can. In fact, it is a perfect piece of writing to mull over, while wandering through the Richard Avedon show at The Image Center.
I tend to think of Richard Avedon as the brilliant photographer of youth, beauty and glamour, but another of his fascinations was aging and that’s what this show is all about.
Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
– Richard Avedon
What do we see written in the ledger of the Duke and Duchess? Defiance and Contempt? Fear and Resignation? This pair also seem to be pleading for something: understanding, vindication … a dinner invitation?
It was 1963 and Richard Avedon traveled to the American South. He had a list of possible subjects provided by Langston Hughes. William Casby was 106 years old when Richard Avedon created this portrait of him. His face is a nearly abstract mask. Is it bitterness and anger or simply a very old man struggling to see through cataracts?
On the same trip Richard Avedon photographed a youthful George Wallace near the time of his election as Governor of Alabama. He looks cocky and relaxed as he campaigned on the promise to fight against racial integration. The speech he gave at his inauguration contained the phrase: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”
Richard Avedon returned to Alabama to photograph George Wallace again, in 1993, thirty years after the first portrait. George Wallace continued as a force in Alabama politics although an assassination attempt, which occurred during his 1972 Presidential bid, left him paralyzed.
I guess the genius of Richard Avedon is, with regard to these pictures of aging, you are compelled to wonder, how did this person get that face?
Chet Baker’s nickname was “The Prince of Cool.” His was a chaotic lifestyle, dogged by heroin addiction for decades. He described his life as “1/3 in a car, 1/3 sleeping, and 1/3 playing music.” Richard Avedon captures so much tragedy and sadness in the face of this gifted man. It was taken just a few years prior to his death, which occurred when he apparently fell out the window of an Amsterdam hotel.
And here we have Rose Kennedy: steely, resolute and yet wistful somehow. At this juncture in 1976, four of her nine children had already died violently.
With a few exceptions, the photographs in this show capture people already old in the nineteen eighties. We’re looking at the celebrities of an America that has vanished. Even though I have seen most of these photographs before, they strike me as fascinating right now. They depict a USA and a cohort, that is no more.
Gloria Swanson was about 80 years old when Richard Avedon took this picture. She is vivacious and beautiful, wildly laughing, running her hands through her unruly mane of silver hair.
Madonna, shown above, in a post from her Instagram account is pushing up on 70 years of age, a little more than ten years younger than Gloria Swanson was in 1980.
The ledger of her face can’t tell us much.
