Featuring close to 100 portraits of public figures like Chet Baker, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, Duke Ellington, Patti Smith and Jean Renoir, Immortal is dedicated to one of the 20th century’s most celebrated photographers, focusing on a fascinating and unexpected dimension of his work: aging.

For nearly half a century, American portraitist and fashion photographer Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of people he photographed: from artists and writers to politicians and performers, to the everyday citizens in his best-known series, In the American West.

These portraits—visual “sermons on bravado,” as he sometimes called them—dramatized the universal experience of aging and testified unflinchingly to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality. Few artists have addressed this subject as consistently or controversially as did Avedon, who explored aging throughout his career as America’s most influential portrait photographer.