Richard Avedon’s brutal, beautiful portraits of aging on display in Toronto

With his black-and-white portraits of most of the later 20th century’s luminaries, Richard Avedon became the most famous photographer in America by the 1960s.

Born in New York City in 1923, Avedon started taking pictures as a teenager. He was mentored by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, and soon began to publish in Vogue and Life, too.

By the 1950s, Avedon had developed a style that was severe and recognizable. An Avedon subject is almost always backed by a simple white backdrop. They are lit with a 1500W flood light described by collaborator Norma Stevens as being “like sun — it bathed the model in a constant light.”

This so-called Beauty Light, continued Stevens, “could also do the opposite and give you the deep lines on people’s faces.” The opposition Stevens drew between beauty and honesty was a fault line running under Avedon’s work, one that often ruptured into controversy.

A close-up portrait of President Dwight Eisenhower taken in 1964 shows a warrior diminished: jaw slack, eyebrows wispy and white, face creased with lines and recesses, eyes drifting aside. One critic wrote that Avedon had rendered the former president with “the dazed stare of one who has been wholly lobotomized.”

Avedon’s work, the critic concluded, was “giving the suburban clubwoman a titillating peek into the obscene and ugly faces of the mad, the dispossessed, and the great and near-great.”

The subject of Avedon’s picture — the man who was once Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, the rugged West Point warrior from newsreels and campaign posters — is revealed to be an ordinary old man.

The picture of Eisenhower is included in the Image Centre’s ambitious new exhibition “Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951 to 2004” (on display until Dec. 5), which brings together the photographer’s portraits of aging. Like the Eisenhower portrait, much of the work here was once accused of being cruel and exploitative for its starkness, its refusal to varnish the raw realities of getting older.

There was no doubt an element of provocation here and this otherwise noble goal often drew the ire of his subjects; Truman Capote remonstrated against Avedon’s “very unflattering” portrait of him. Capote’s mistake was to think Avedon cared to flatter when really he intended to find beauty in the great ordinariness of his mythic subjects.

“I never thought of my pictures as cruel in any way, but as sort of beautiful,” he told a critic in 1999. “I really find great beauty in the sort of avalanche of flesh that happens to a face with age.”

“Avedon explored three themes in his work: beauty, power and aging,” said Paul Roth, the curator of the Image Centre’s show, as we walked into the main gallery.

Here are the characters from politics and art whose names (Kennedy, Beckett, Pound) are known to us for having made history happen, portrayed now with the august dignity of the emeritus, still commanding respect but now more advisers than commanders. The high drama of the exhibition comes from this collision of public figure and private, aging body.

Given the controversies, I was surprised to see how much grace and dignity Avedon affords most of his subjects. In Avedon’s portraits, aging is rendered as the accrual of wisdom and experience as much as it is the diminishing of physical capabilities.

For example, in “Toni Morrison, writer, New York, Sept. 10, 2003,” the novelist stands in a black sweater, her right hand bunched in a fist and covered with her left hand. She was in her early 70s; grey rims her hair like a crown.

Having won the Nobel Prize for Literature a decade earlier, Morrison had assumed a regal position as one of the great American writers and is depicted as such. Morrison’s seniority becomes her.

The curator Roth — who was executive director of the Richard Avedon Foundation before he became director of the Image Centre — makes several curatorial choices that give the work new resonance.

One is the decision to place Avedon’s portrait of William Casby — a Louisiana man born into slavery — beside “The Generals of the Daughters of the American Revolution,” a 1963 photograph of the hereditary society’s officers preparing to sit for their portrait at a convention in Washington.

The dignity of aging is given two different expressions here. Casby’s is earned by survival, by enduring great historical injustice. The Daughters’ is closer to a self-appointment, a claimed inheritance, like the privilege of a family title.

Placed side by side, the pictures suggest that history has a say in who is able to “age gracefully.” More than that, Roth’s pairing prompts us to ask, Who is permitted to have a legacy and who must fight for one?

The Image Centre’s “Immortal” also includes a full recreation of Avedon’s 1974 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Jacob Israel Avedon.” In a room across from the main gallery hang seven mural-sized photographs of Avedon’s terminally ill father taken between 1969 and 1973.

They are unadorned, unflinching. A man plainly and slowly dies over the course of the series. I had to look away from one of the pictures of Jacob Avedon, which has him staring off-camera, lips slightly opened, his face nearly vacant. This, indeed, is a man who knows he will soon die.

It is Avedon’s characteristic matter-of-factness that makes these so tremendously difficult to look at, an extreme version of the brutal honesty that revolted his critics.

But for Avedon, to look away is to deny not just reality but the astonishing variations of beauty, whether a five-star general who has laid down his arms or a dying father looking for the last time at his famous son. “Immortal” asks its audience to find, as Avedon does, the pathos and pleasure in these harsh and abrasive images.