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Richard Avedon loathed ageing – but he existed amidst it, found humor in it, saw it with pity as well as, primarily, fatalistically. “I’m a geezer,” he declared in his earlier years as a senior. Throughout his career, he made innumerable images of the consequences of ageing on the human face, and its unavoidable nature. For an artist originally, and perhaps in popular thought even now, best known for images of youth and beauty, vitality and joy – a young woman twirling her dress, leaping over a puddle, playing pinball in Paris at midnight – an equal portion exists of his body of work devoted to the old and wizened and wise.

The Nuance in Human Nature

His associates frequently remarked that he appeared as the most youthful individual present – yet he had no desire to be the youngest person in the room. This was, though not quite offensive, a triviality: what he desired was to stand as the most complex individual present. He cherished blended sentiments and opposition within a single image, or sitter, instead of a clustering at the poles of sentiment. He admired pictures like the famous Leonardo da Vinci which contrasts the outline of an attractive adolescent with a nutcracker-jawed old man. And so, in a striking combination of photographs featuring filmmakers, initially one might perceive the aggressive John Ford contrasted with the benevolent Jean Renoir. The director's twisted smirk and flamboyant, angry eye patch – such a covering appears hostile in its persistence on ensuring you notice of the absent orb – seen against the gentle humanist glance of Renoir, who appears initially like a sage French artist-saint of the same kind as Georges Braque.

Yet, examine a second time, and the two directors display both aggression and kindness, the pugilistic curl of their lips contradicting the warmth in their look, and Renoir's uneven stare is as calculating as it is benevolent. The American director could be intimidating us (in a typically American way), yet Renoir is assessing us. The simple, opposing stereotypes about humanistic ideals are either subverted or enriched: individuals don't achieve directorial status by geniality alone. Drive, skill and purpose are also depicted.

A Battle Opposing Conventions

Avedon fought with photographic conventions, including the cliches of ageing, and whatever appeared only morally superior or overly idealized displeased him. Paradox was the engine of his art. At times, it proved hard for his sitters to believe that he didn't intend to diminish them or being disloyal to them when he told them that he held in esteem their hidden aspects just like what they proudly showed. This explained partly Avedon found it difficult, and didn't fully succeed, in confronting his own aging persona – on one hand depicting himself as too irate in a fashion that was unlike him, or alternatively too rigid in a style that was too isolated, possibly since the crucial opposition within his own personality was just as hidden from him as his subjects’ were to them. The magician could work magic for his subjects yet not on his own person.

The real contradiction within his personality – from the solemn and strict observer of people's successes he was and the ambitious, intensely competitive presence inside the New York scene he was frequently described as – was invisible to him, just as our own paradoxes escape us. A late-in-life documentary showed him moonily walking the cliffs of Montauk outside his house, lost in thought – a place in fact he never went, staying indoors on the telephone with friends, advising, comforting, devising strategies, delighting.

Authentic Foci

The senior figures who had mastered the art of being dual-natured – or even multiple personas – were his true subjects, and his gift for somehow conveying their varied personas in an extremely condensed and outwardly concise single image stays awe-inspiring, exceptional in the annals of photographic portraiture. He frequently excels with the worst: the prejudiced poet Pound screams with existential agony, and the Windsor royal couple become a frightened wide-eyed Beckett couple. Even the people he admired were enhanced by his vision for their imbalances: Stravinsky looks at us with an even stare that appears almost pained and calculating, simultaneously a ill-tempered genius and an individual of strategy and drive, a genius and a rug merchant.

WH Auden is a druid and oracle, visage marked by worry, and a mute humorist on an ungainly walk, a wanderer in the Lower East Side with house shoes on in the snow. (“I arose to see snow falling, and I desired to photograph Auden in it Avedon once described, and he phoned up the likely confused yet agreeable poet and sought permission to capture his image.) His image of his contemporary the writer Capote shows him as considerably brighter 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 for her face becoming less “beautiful”, and, registering accurately her decline, he italicised her courage.

Overlooked Portraits

A photograph I previously ignored is the one featuring Harold Arlen, the renowned composer who married blues and jazz to Broadway melody. He was among a category of artists {whom Avedon understood unconditionally|that A