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The photographer Avedon despised growing old – and yet he existed amidst it, laughed about it, saw it with pity and, above all else, with resignation. “I’m getting on,” he declared when still a youngish man in his 60s. Over his professional life, he created countless photographs of the consequences of ageing on the human face, and the certainty of its progression. For an artist initially, and possibly in the world’s imagination even now, best known for images of youth and beauty, energy and happiness – the girl swirling her skirt, leaping over a puddle, enjoying arcade games late at night in Paris – a comparable amount is present of his artistic output devoted to the old and wizened and wise.

The Complexity in Human Nature

His associates often noted that he appeared as the youngest person in the room – but he didn’t want to hold that youthful title. That represented, even if not directly hurtful, a banality: what Dick wanted was to stand as the most complex individual present. He adored blended sentiments and contradiction within a single image, or subject, more than a clumping at the poles of sentiment. He loved images such as the renowned da Vinci artwork that juxtaposes the silhouette of a handsome young man with a senior with a pronounced chin. Therefore, in a beautiful pairing of images depicting cinematic auteurs, initially it appears the belligerent John Ford contrasted with the benevolent Jean Renoir. The director's twisted smirk and showy, irate ocular shield – an eye patch is angry in its determination on forcing your recognition of the loss of the eye – observed in contrast to the soft, compassionate gaze from Renoir, who seems at first like a sage French artist-saint comparable to the artist Braque.

Yet, examine a second time, and both Ford and Renoir are equally belligerent and benevolent, the pugilistic curl of their lips contradicting the light in their gaze, and the director's unbalanced observation is just as strategic as it is saintly. Ford may be staring us down (very Americanly), yet Renoir is assessing us. The simple, opposing stereotypes regarding humanism are either subverted or enriched: men do not become movie directors through mere friendliness. Drive, craft and purpose are also depicted.

A Battle Opposing Conventions

Avedon fought with the cliches of portraiture, including the cliches of ageing, and anything that seemed only morally superior or excessively scenic offended him. Paradox fueled his creative work. It was difficult sometimes for those he photographed to believe that he was not belittling them or betraying them when he expressed to them that he held in esteem what they were hiding just like what they proudly showed. This was a key factor Avedon struggled, and couldn't completely achieve, in taking on his own aging persona – sometimes portraying himself as overly furious in a manner that didn't suit him, or alternatively too rigid in a way that was too self-enclosed, perhaps because the vital contradiction in his own character was just as hidden from him as those he photographed experienced. The wizard could create wonders with other people but not himself.

The real contradiction within his personality – from the solemn and strict observer of people's successes he was and the ambitious, intensely competitive presence within New York he was often accused of being – remained hidden from him, just as our own paradoxes escape us. A film from his later years presented him thoughtfully wandering the bluffs in Montauk near his home, absorbed in reflection – a place in fact he never went, being inside on the telephone with friends, advising, consoling, devising strategies, delighting.

Authentic Foci

The senior figures who knew how of existing in two states simultaneously – or even more things than that – served as his genuine subjects, and his gift for somehow conveying their varied personas in a highly concentrated and outwardly concise single image remains breathtaking, unique in the history of portraiture. He frequently excels with the worst: the prejudiced poet Pound screams with existential agony, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor become a frightened anxious duo reminiscent of Beckett characters. Even the people he admired were enhanced by his vision for their asymmetries: Stravinsky gazes toward us with a direct look that is almost stricken and shrewd, as well as a gruff creative master and a man of calculation and ambition, an artistic master and a businessman.

Auden appears as a mystical figure, countenance showing concern, and a silent comedian on an ungainly walk, a traveler in downtown New York in his bedroom slippers in the snow. (“I awakened to snowfall, and I wished to capture Auden amidst it,” Avedon once described, and he telephoned the presumably bemused but willing poet and sought permission to capture his image.) His photograph of his longtime companion Truman Capote shows him as far more intelligent than he pretended to be and more malicious than he acknowledged. When it came to the elderly Dorothy Parker, Avedon did not admire her spirit less as her looks faded, and, truthfully documenting her decline, he italicised her courage.

Neglected Images

A photograph I previously ignored is the one featuring Harold Arlen, the renowned composer who blended blues with jazz to Broadway melody. He belonged to a group of individuals {whom Avedon understood unconditionally|that A