Curator Talk: Paul Roth on Richard Avedon Immortal

Join Image Centre Director (and exhibition curator) Paul Roth for a special talk focused on Richard Avedon’s influential series Jacob Israel Avedon, which chronicled his father’s final years through nine extraordinary portraits. These photographs, first displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1974 and now on view at The Image Centre, were hailed by many as Avedon’s masterpiece, while others saw them as exploitative and cruel. Roth will discuss the series in depth, addressing the man behind the portraits, his relationship with his famous photographer son, and the making of the seminal MoMA exhibition.

This event is generously supported by Anju Virmani.

About the Speaker Paul Roth is Director of The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. Previously, he served as Executive Director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York; as Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; and as archivist of the Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Since 1990, Roth has organized (or helped organize) more than 100 museum exhibitions and film programs. A leading authority on the life and work of Richard Avedon, Roth edited and co-authored Richard Avedon: Immortal, Portraits of Aging 1951-2004 (Phaidon, 2025), as well as Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (Steidl, 2008), and contributed an essay to Richard Avedon: Murals and Portraits (Gagosian, 2012). Roth is also co-author of numerous books about American photographer Gordon Parks, including Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story (2018) and Gordon Parks: Collected Works (2012).

About the Exhibition Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004 September 9–December 5, 2026 South Gallery & North Gallery Curator: Paul Roth

For nearly half a century, celebrated American photographer Richard Avedon confronted one of portraiture’s enduring taboos: aging. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon broke with the conventions of idealized celebrity portraiture, revealing the marks of time on his subjects’ faces with unsparing clarity. Bringing together nearly 100 portraits made between the early 1950s and 2004, the exhibition features artists, writers, musicians, and cultural icons including Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Duke Ellington, Ronald Reagan, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Patti Smith, Truman Capote, and the Dalai Lama. Immortal also includes a restaging of Avedon’s seminal 1974 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Jacob Israel Avedon, which chronicled his father’s final years in nine extraordinary portraits. Taken as a whole, the photographs reveal a lesser-known dimension of Avedon’s practice and offer an unprecedented exploration of aging through his distinctive vision.