MONTREAL.- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting the Canadian premiere of an exhibition dedicated to legendary photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004). Bringing together some 100 portraits of well-known and lesser-known cultural and political figures, this poignant presentation is an unflinching exploration of aging from one of the 20th century’s most renowned photographers.

“In a culture enthralled by youth and beauty, Richard Avedon turned his lens on the universal experience of aging with unflinching candour. The faces he photographed are not softened by nostalgia or sentiment; they are inscribed with time and the weight of lived experience. Refusing the comfort of idealization, Avedon’s portraits offer deeply human encounters, where each wrinkle bears witness to a singular life lived,” says Mary-Dailey Desmarais, the Zhao-Ionescu Chief Curator of the MMFA.

Few artists have addressed this subject as consistently or controversially as did Avedon, who explored aging throughout his career as America’s most influential portrait photographer. This exhibition features portraits of cultural icons like Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Truman Capote, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Jean Renoir and Patti Smith, as well as lesser-known people from all walks of life.

From Avedon’s earliest years at America’s pre-eminent fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, the standard practice for editorial photographers was to represent public personalities in a way that flattered them by means of favourable poses and angles; bounced or diffused light; special lenses and filters that softened facial features; and post-photography retouching to smooth the skin’s appearance. Avedon, however, routinely and audaciously violated these tenets, highlighting infirmities, wrinkles, crow’s feet, folds of skin, and liver spots—the outward markers of what he once called “the avalanche of age,” falling over the human face and body.

Jacob Israel Avedon Series

While Immortal includes portraits from throughout Avedon’s career, his celebrated series Jacob Israel Avedon (1969-1973), first displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1974, sits at the heart of the exhibition. It chronicles his elderly father’s last years in a sequence of just nine memorable portraits, tracing his passage towards death from cancer. Author Owen Edwards memorably reviewed the show as “unbearably powerful…[these] are not serene studies of an old saint waiting for his ride to paradise. Rather, they are visual metaphors for the cosmic unfairness of death, coming along, as it does, full of disdain for all the sweat and pain of survival.”

Following its run in Montreal, Immortal will be presented at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University in September 2026.