"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."
"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."
Richard Avedon both feared and inhabited ageing, producing countless portraits that examine the consequences and inevitability of growing older. He balanced images of youth, beauty and vitality with sustained attention to the old, wizened and wise. He cultivated complexity and contradiction within single images and sitters, preferring mixed emotions over simple categorization. He admired juxtapositions that reveal inner conflict, such as a youthful profile beside a nutcracker-jawed old man. Portrait pairings, like those of John Ford and Jean Renoir, expose simultaneous belligerence and benevolence and show how facial details both conceal and disclose character.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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