Until August 9, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presents "Richard Avedon: Immortal. Portraits of Time Passing, 1951-2004," the first Canadian exhibition dedicated to the American photographer (1923-2004). Nearly one hundred portraits, taken between 1951 and 2004, comprise a subject that Avedon never lost sight of: aging.
The exhibition's organizing principle can be summed up in a few words. Rather than tracing Avedon's career in its entirety—from Harper's Bazaar to Vogue, including his advertising campaigns for Calvin Klein and Revlon—the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, co-organizers of the project, focus on a thread running through his entire body of work: the way he photographed bodies and faces marked by time, without retouching them. Mary-Dailey Desmarais, chief curator of the MMFA, points out that no exhibition had yet specifically examined this aspect of his work.
The choice goes against the grain of what was expected of a fashion photographer in the 1950s. Retouching that smoothed skin, lighting that erased wrinkles: Avedon deliberately departs from these techniques, and instead emphasizes what he called "the avalanche of time." The white background, almost always the same from one portrait to the next, strips the image of any embellishment and focuses attention solely on the face, a device that the critics at Le Devoir described as a mixture of controlled warmth and coldness, the light spreading across it to the point of dazzling brilliance within a black-bordered frame.
The exhibition brings together recognizable figures—Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, Duke Ellington, Patti Smith, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Renoir—alongside anonymous individuals, without distinction of status within the display. The approach has something of an equalizing quality: icons and unknowns face the same challenge in front of the camera.
The most unsettling moment of the exhibition remains the "Jacob Israel Avedon" series, created between 1969 and 1973 and first shown at MoMA in 1974. Nine portraits chronicle the decline of the photographer's father, who succumbed to cancer, up to the days before his death. The series divided critics at the time, with some finding it intrusive; it is now presented as the high point of the Montreal exhibition, the one where the viewer's gaze becomes genuinely uncomfortable.
The exhibition catalogue, published by Phaidon in French and English and edited by Paul Roth, director of the Image Centre and curator of the exhibition, features nearly one hundred portraits and includes essays by Vince Aletti and Adam Gopnik, both close friends of Avedon during his lifetime. Gopnik, a columnist for The New Yorker since 1986, will discuss the catalogue at the Museum on March 4.
Around the exhibition, the MBAM offers an opening meeting between Paul Roth and Mary-Dailey Desmarais (February 11) and two screenings of "Funny Face" by Stanley Donen, a 1957 musical comedy loosely inspired by the life of Avedon as a young photographer at Harper's Bazaar (February 13 and 14).
After Montreal, the exhibition will travel to the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University in September 2026.
"Richard Avedon: Immortal. Portraits of Time Passing, 1951-2004"
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
1380 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Canada
