The Lena Ghio Paradox/Le Paradoxe Lena Ghio: RICHARD AVEDON: The Face of Time

Sunday, February 15, 2026

RICHARD AVEDON: The Face of Time

A sobering exhibition of Richard Avedon’s relentless search for the truth about aging and his tireless quest for exactitude, presented by Museum Director Stéphane Aquin in the presence of exhibition curators Paul Roth, Director of The Image Centre, and Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Zhao-Ionescu Chief Curator of the MMFA.

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Until August 9, 2026

Richard Avedon: Immortal Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004

At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Richard Avedon: Immortal — Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004 stages a confrontation long deferred in the photographer’s reception. Best known for the kinetic glamour of his fashion work at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and later for his editorial acuity at The New Yorker, Richard Avedon has too often been flattened into a chronicler of chic modernity. This exhibition—curated by Paul Roth with Mary-Dailey Desmarais—reclaims the other, more disquieting axis of his practice: an unrelenting meditation on aging, mortality, and the ethics of looking.

Avedon’s white seamless backdrop, that infamous void, here reads less as a formalist signature than as an existential device. By stripping away context, he does not universalize his sitters so much as expose them. The black edge of the negative—left insistently visible—becomes a memento mori: a reminder of the photograph’s material finitude, its indexical bond to a body that will perish. In this sense, Avedon’s minimalism is not cool but metaphysical. The white ground is not purity; it is the antechamber of disappearance.

The exhibition’s premise is deceptively simple: to assemble nearly a hundred portraits under the sign of age. Yet this curatorial gesture reorders Avedon’s oeuvre. Figures long canonized as emblems of charisma—Ronald Reagan, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Dalai Lama—are wrested from the circuitry of celebrity and repositioned within a more fragile temporality. Avedon’s lens neither flatters nor condemns; it waits. Reagan’s practiced geniality appears strained, almost lacquered over a slackening musculature. Ellington’s elegance is shadowed by fatigue. Morrison’s gaze, by contrast, seems to thicken with time—her face a palimpsest of vigilance and wit. The Dalai Lama’s smile, so often circulated as an icon of serenity, flickers here as something harder won.

Gabriel García Márquez

Jorge Luis Borges

If early civilizations revered elders as “living libraries,” modernity has tended to recode aging as malfunction. The industrial reorganization of life into productive and post-productive phases rendered the elderly economically peripheral; the contemporary biohacking imaginary recasts mortality as a technical glitch. Against this backdrop, Avedon’s portraits refuse both sanctification and repair. They neither romanticize wisdom nor promise optimization. Instead, they insist on visibility—on the face as an archive where experience accumulates without guarantee of redemption.

This insistence was controversial. In the 1960s and ’70s, when airbrushed perfection dominated fashion imagery, Avedon’s refusal to smooth wrinkles or soften sagging skin read as cruelty. Yet the exhibition makes clear that what was mistaken for severity is closer to a rigorous humanism. Consider the juxtaposition of directors John Ford and Jean Renoir, photographed on the same day in April 1972. Ford, eye patch stark against the white ground, turns away in a scowl that borders on defiance; Renoir’s expression is porous, almost wistful. The pairing stages two attitudes toward decline: resistance and acceptance. Avedon adjudicates neither. He frames.

The exhibition’s emotional fulcrum remains the series Jacob Israel Avedon, first shown at the Museum of Modern Artin 1974. Across nine portraits, Avedon documents his father’s deterioration from cancer. Here, the white backdrop becomes intimate, nearly claustrophobic. The son’s camera does not avert its gaze as the father’s body thins, his eyes recede, his skin loosens into translucency. These images risk sentimentality yet avoid it through restraint. They are less about filial grief than about time’s inscription on flesh. In them, Avedon’s project crystallizes: photography as an ethics of witness.

Avedon also undertakes meticulous photographic studies of ordinary people. Here, two farmers are depicted, retaining their human dignity after a lifetime of hard work.

Seen in 2026, amid Silicon Valley’s longevity evangelism and the spectacle of billionaires pursuing rejuvenation through stem cells and transfusions, Avedon’s work acquires renewed urgency. The medieval fantasy of the Fountain of Youth has mutated into engineering rhetoric—optimization, enhancement, extension. But as Carl Jung observed, “The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different.” Avedon photographs precisely this afternoon: not as failure, but as density. His sitters’ faces do not ask to be repaired; they demand to be read.

The achievement of Immortal lies in revealing that Avedon’s true subject was never glamour, nor even fame, but finitude. By suspending his subjects in a white void, he paradoxically anchors them in the only context that cannot be airbrushed away: mortality itself. Each wrinkle becomes an event; each sag, a chronicle. In an era that treats aging as a bug to be patched, Avedon offers a counterproposal—aging as narrative, as exposure, as the final and most democratic portrait sitting.

Avedon’s work rewards sustained looking, and this exhibition in particular opens a space for deep meditation that moves beyond the familiar fashion narrative.