Hi friend,
If we're lucky, aging will happen to every one of us, but we talk about it so little, and we all deserve to understand aging and be treated better in our aging bodies.
Some of it is that social media is a young person's game. It burns out people, especially activists, as we age. And some of it is that, in a youth-worshipping, fatphobic, ableist culture, people are treated as invisible when they're old enough to lose their "value" to beauty standards and capitalism.
It's so important that we're able to see and normalize aging bodies, and I'm always thrilled to photograph people over 40, 50, 60, 70, 80....
This is my loved one K. and her dog Bella. They live far from us, so we don't get to see them often, but we were able to spend a couple of days with them in Los Angeles last fall.
These two have been supporting each other through some hard life changes, and I leaned firmly on my "You don't have to smile" policy when I caught K. as we were all leaving our hotel rooms and talked her into sitting for a quick set of portraits.
