Opening Reception: Richard Avedon Immortal at The Image Centre

Join us on September 9 from 6–8 pm for a free public reception celebrating the opening of Richard Avedon Immortal and The Image Centre’s fall exhibition season.
Be among the first to experience Richard Avedon Immortal, a landmark exhibition celebrating the uncompromising vision of one of photography’s most influential figures. Also on view are Tanya Marcuse: Portent and Madison Chow: Overflow.
Spend the evening exploring these thought-provoking exhibitions, connecting with artists and curators, and enjoying light refreshments and a cash bar.

Free, Eventbrite registration required
Tickets/more information: theimagecentre.ca/events
Please have your Eventbrite registration ready when you arrive. All bags may be subject to inspection by gallery security upon entry.

About the Exhibitions
Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004
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.

Tanya Marcuse: Portent
Tanya Marcuse’s multichannel video Portent presents ominous scenes of the natural world—trees swaying in the wind, vapour rising from volcanic fumaroles, icy branches illuminated by flickering light, and other small disturbances that hint at forces beyond our understanding. The quiet is deliberate; the frame remains fixed while the environment shifts restlessly within it, evoking a tension between stillness and motion, beauty and unease, the known and unknown.
Marcuse describes her work as an exploration of the kinship between disaster and the sublime, and of the ways the world around us is continually threatened, transformed, and made strange. Portent forms part of her expansive series Book of Miracles (2020–26), inspired by the Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch, a 16th-century illuminated manuscript depicting natural disasters, supernatural phenomena, celestial spectacles, and unexplained oddities. Like the fantastic visions of the original, Portent’s tableaux slip toward the uncanny, suggesting an anxious molting of nature—the instability of change into a new and unknowable state of being.
Created against our present-day backdrop of extreme weather, political upheaval, and the lingering disorientation of the pandemic, Portent channels a heightened awareness of our entanglement with a rapidly changing planet. In the delicate tremor of leaves and grasses, Marcuse conveys a sense of awe shot through with foreboding—a recognition that the fragile systems sustaining us are as uncertain as they are wondrous.

Madison Chow: Overflow
The water has a body, and so do I. A body as old as time itself, one that has ebbed and flowed for longer than I can comprehend. Yet within the tradition of photography, we have often constrained bodies of water and other natural elements to romantic fragments within their time. We halt them within the photographic moment, failing to recognize water for its ephemeral and animate nature, one that requires our dedication and time to understand.
Overflow seeks to recognize picture as privilege by inviting water to be a collaborator in the photographic process. By using a camera-less medium, the traditional colonial gaze of the lens is removed from the creation of the image, allowing the water to take a leading role in its own imaging. To create these images, I met the water at the shoreline, often in the quiet of morning, and arranged a composition that included nearby flora, natural objects from along the shore, or my own body. As the water rushed to meet the paper it slowly carved its features into the material, aided by both natural and artificial UV light. Guided by intuition, what emerged were vibrant self-portraits of one of Earth’s most dynamic elements, existing as both abstract documentation of an uncontrollable force and a tangible record of the strong connection between myself and these bodies of water that have been forged over time. Made on visits to both freshwater and saltwater bodies, Overflow exists as part of a personal pursuit to image the natural world in a truthful, respectful, and reciprocal manner, placing importance on learning to revere the oceans and lakes that surround us.
– Madison Chow

Accessibility
We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming experience for all visitors. Available amenities include:
Accessible entrance;
Large-print texts for all exhibitions;
Wheelchair available on site;
Folding stools in the gallery;
Accessible and gender-neutral washroom;
Change tables.
Please let us know if we can provide any accommodations to support your participation in this event.
Image above: The Image Centre © Toni Hafkenscheid, 2026
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RICHARD AVEDON IMMORTAL is organized by The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Generous lead sponsorship for RICHARD AVEDON IMMORTAL is provided by Florence Minz. The show is made possible by Exhibition Sponsors: Hatch and Home Equity Bank. Additional contributions provided by our Supporting Sponsors: Extendicare, Anju Virmani, the Bulmash-Siegel Private Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Our Media Sponsors are Toronto Star and ZoomerMedia.