I’ve been working on photographs about finding beauty in youth’s reversal: in what is old, what is faded, what is brittle, what is frail. I’ve looked for things in nature that age with an elegance that, to me at least, classify the work as the archeology of beauty.
It’s not a political statement. I’m 63 years old and I am comfortable with no longer appearing young. Or looking younger than I am. I’m not angry about “losing my looks” or even about becoming what many, especially women, experience as the trauma of becoming invisible. I understand that this feeling is real and it can be difficult to cope with; it’s not something I personally experience.
My pursuit of beauty in things like dying/dead flowers, rotting fruit, bruised vegetables is about my interest in questioning and challenging. In turning beliefs on their head and exploring something from an unconventional angle. What if we could see the aging process in a new way? What if we could widen the spectrum of what is seen and appreciated as beautiful to include what is wise and experienced and, yes, still standing?
This is a photograph I made of a small group of flowers well past the sell-by date. Look at the daffodil — the lines, the fraying, the brittle quality of the still-radiant petals. And the curled up rose, with the pink deepening as time progresses, becoming more pink, deeper pink, wondrous pink. Not first blush pink, but intense and experienced pink.
It isn’t beauty for beauty’s sake that interests me. No, what drives the work is a desire to show something that is there but isn’t seen. Not really hidden, very rarely noticed.
“I focus excessively and dramatically on that which was never really hidden, but rarely is noticed. My motivations are analogous in the sense that they are small – they only enlarge under the scrutiny of hindsight, which is usually a distortion.”
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Photographer
The photograph of old flowers can be seen as a love letter to the beauty of aging. To what is possible over time. What is gained, even. I could be railing against a socio-cultural system that tells aging women, in particular, that we’re too old for this and too dry, too past our primes. But this feels like the opposite kind of exploration: observing and finding the small miracles of color deepened, lines more intricately articulated, textures more prominent and individual.
This is the scarification — life’s natural tattoos — of a life lived.