Book Signing with Paul Roth: November 29, 2025, 2 – 5pm
Call or email the gallery to preorder your copy.
The Stephen Bulger Gallery is pleased to present a book signing with Paul Roth in the Reading Room Gallery. The event will honour the release of Richard Avedon Immortal, Phaidon, 2025.
Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004 celebrates Avedon’s unflinching exploration of aging through nearly 100 striking portraits and fresh insights into his enduring vision. Edited by Roth, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker) and contributions from Gaëlle Morel and Vince Aletti, this landmark publication precedes a major exhibition opening at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in February 2026 and at The Image Centre in September 2026.
For more than half a century, Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of the people he photographed. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through to the twenty-first century, Avedon routinely and audaciously broke the rule of flattering public personalities in his portraits. Instead, he chose to highlight the onslaught of what he called the “avalanche of age,” dramatizing the universal experience of getting older.
Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Immortal is the first book to delve into Avedon’s unflinching representation of aging throughout his career.
This elegant hardcover volume features nearly 100 portraits of cultural luminaries, each printed in striking tritone, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, and Stephen Sondheim, as well as one of Avedon’s last self-portraits.
Thoughtfully edited and beautifully produced, Immortal testifies emphatically to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality.
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).
