The good, the bad and the beautiful: how the great photographer Richard Avedon captured ageing

<p>From a joyful Gloria Swanson to the Windsors looking scared, Avedon spent much of his career shooting the old, the wizened and the wise – uncovering the contradictions of the heart </p><p>Richard Avedon hated ageing – and lived within it, laughed about it, viewed it piteously, compassionately and, above all else (how could he not?), fatalistically. “I’m a geezer,” he would say when still a youngish man in his 60s. Throughout his career, he made innumerable images of the consequences of ageing on the human face, and of its inevitability. For someone first, and perhaps in the world’s imagination still, most associated with images of youth and beauty, vitality and joy – the girl swirling her skirt, leaping over a puddle, playing pinball in Paris at midnight – there is at least as much of his oeuvre (his “Irv” as he would self-mockingly say) devoted to the old and wizened and wise.</p><p>His friends always said that he was the youngest person in the room – but he didn’t want to be the youngest person in the room. It was, if not exactly an insult, a banality: what Dick wanted was to be the most complicated person in the room. He loved mixed emotions and contradiction within a single image, or sitter, more than a clumping at either end of the emotional spectrum. He loved images like the famous Leonardo da Vinci that juxtaposes the profile of a beautiful youth with a nutcracker-jawed old man. And so, in a beautiful pairing of portraits of movie directors, at first we may see the belligerent John Ford pitted against the benevolent Jean Renoir. Ford’s curled lip and ostentatious, angry eye patch – an eye patch is angry in its insistence on making you aware of the loss of the eye – seen against the gentle humanist glance of Renoir, who seems at first like a sage French artist-saint of the same kind as Georges Braque.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/oct/06/great-photographer-richard-avedon-ageing-gloria-