A new coffee-table book celebrates the later career of renowned fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon, focusing on his powerful portraits of aging subjects including cultural icons like Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, and Patti Smith. "Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004," edited by Paul Roth, the former director of the Richard Avedon Foundation, presents nearly 100 portraits that showcase a dramatically different side of Avedon's photographic legacy.

Despite his mastery of the medium, Avedon maintained a complicated relationship with cameras throughout his career. As he confessed in his 1959 book "Observations" with Truman Capote, "I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I just could work with my eyes alone!" This sentiment persisted even as he evolved from using a simple Kodak Brownie as a young member of the Young Men's Hebrew Association Camera Club to sophisticated equipment including the Rolleiflex twin-lens camera for his early Harper's Bazaar assignments and eventually large-format 8-by-10 view cameras for his portrait work.

Avedon's journey to Harper's Bazaar wasn't immediate—it took 14 attempts before he finally secured a meeting with the magazine's art director, Alexey Brodovitch, eventually landing his first assignment with Junior Bazaar. Throughout his early fashion photography career, Avedon sought to capture qualities beyond mere appearance, particularly power, beauty, and youth. This approach is exemplified in his iconic 1955 photograph "Dovima with Elephants," which shows the model in a black Dior evening gown with a white sash at the waist, posed like the goddess Athena between restless elephants from Paris's Cirque d'Hiver.

Later in his career, Avedon deliberately shifted his focus from celebrating beauty and youth to what he called "the avalanche of age." His portraits from this period deliberately highlighted his subjects' wrinkles, crow's feet, liver spots, and stiffened shoulders. Perhaps the most striking example of this approach is his portrait series of his dying father, Jacob Israel Avedon, photographed in Sarasota, Florida in 1973. Using black-and-white film, Avedon shot these intimate images in stark lighting against completely empty backgrounds.

The photographer's unflinching portrayal of aging drew significant critical attention and interpretation. Many critics, including The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, viewed this approach as either "photographic revenge against his famous subjects" or "an act of artistic penance for his elevation of youth." However, Avedon himself offered a different explanation, stating that these raw images represented "what it is to be any one of us," suggesting a more universal human experience rather than artistic vindictiveness.

The new book features a diverse collection of cultural luminaries captured during their later years, including sculptor Louise Nevelson (photographed in New York in 1975), actress Gloria Swanson (shot by Avedon in New York in 1980), Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison (New York, 2003), and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (New York, 1957). The collection also includes a self-portrait by Avedon taken in New York in 2002, just two years before his death in 2004.

"Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004" includes a foreword by Adam Gopnik along with texts from other distinguished writers, creating a comprehensive examination of this particular aspect of Avedon's work. Published by Phaidon and priced at $79.95, the handsome volume demonstrates why Avedon himself has achieved a form of immortality through his art. The book serves as both a tribute to the photographer's technical mastery and his profound ability to capture the human condition in all its stages, cementing his legacy as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.