Going through time: a photo project on aging

By 2030, it is projected that one in six people globally will be aged 60 years or over.

These are numbers. Beyond numbers, there’s the fact of aging as experienced by each of us. Aging is not just something that happens to our bodies but also something that happens in the way we think about ourselves, and the way others think about us.

These narratives around aging permeate our culture: ageism, isolation, changing expectations towards how an older person should dress, talk, or behave. The expectations and assumptions of others combine with the way we perceive ourselves going through time.

In my grandma’s village, in rural Romania, older widows were expected to dress in black for an indefinite period and never to remarry or have other relationships. It was as if their lives had essentially stopped with the death of their husbands, and what followed was more of a perpetual mourning survival.

While I was working on the photo project on autism, I realized that the little attention that is given to autism is almost exclusively focused on children. Autistic adults are invisible. It’s as if those kids never grew up. Or maybe we vaguely expect them to have outgrown their autism.

I’ve had this idea about a project on aging for several years. It took shape gradually in the back of my mind, pushed in one direction or another by different experiences. Above all, there was the experience of my own aging and my struggles with it.

At some point, I wrote a few paragraphs and I sent a message to different associations that work with elderly people. Some of them replied. I went to meet them and explain what I want to do. About two months ago, I started meeting potential participants. I started by discussing with them. Explaining why I do this. What I expect from it. Trying to see where they come from. What they are struggling with. How aging affects their daily life, relationships, work, hobbies. How it affects the way they perceive themselves.

Starting a new project is hard and often frustrating. But there’s also something exhilarating about getting an idea out of your head and turning it into a thing out there. A thing claiming its space in this world. Claiming its voice.

The perceptions and expectations of others, as well as our own perceptions and expectations, influence how we think about ourselves in terms of autonomy, physical fitness, attractiveness. They influence our relation with the past and the way we think about the future. It affects the way we are towards the people we love. The way we face the world each morning.

It multiplies whatever unresolved issues we may have and reinforces the dysfunctional coping mechanisms we carry.

This is why memory is central to this photo project: how we deal with what has happened so far, how much meaning and coherence we find in our life, how much would we want (or not) to take refuge in the past, how much of that past is unsettled, without closure.

Memory is a strange animal. It can become a cage in which we twist and turn, continuously trying to get back to a moment when things were better, or a moment where things were incredibly bad and they were never made right. But memory is also a vehicle for meaning and purpose. Something that makes it possible to go forward precisely because you know where you are coming from, what was lost of the way, what was built, what endured.

Memory is what makes it possible to build meaning out of bits and pieces of life that would otherwise remain just an incoherent and fragmented drifting through time.

The game is on. A dedicated project website is coming soon.