People try so hard.
There are billion dollar industries, creams, surgery, photoshop. Ageing is the enemy and humans are on a quest to fight and destroy the ageing process until we all look in our 20s forever. Don't get me started on why you'd want to look 20 forever but let me take a quoted excerpt and apply it to my love of photography and capturing memories of lives well lived whether lived through hardship, pure bliss or a healthy mixture of both. It has struck me to plead the case for ageing and with a sense of pride and ownership, allowing your body to do as it will until your last breath.
"Aging is out of your control. How you handle it, though, is in your hands.... In my older face, I see my life. Every wrinkle, every smile line, every age spot. There is a saying that with age, you look outside what you are inside. If you are someone who never smiles, your face gets saggy. If you're a person who smiles a lot, you will have more smile lines. Your wrinkles reflect the roads you have taken; they form the map of your life. My face reflects the wind and sun and rain and dust from the trips I've taken. My face carries all my memories. Why should I erase them?" - Diane Von Furstenberg
Furstenberg has used some excellent reasons to literally allow yourself to show your age (acting it is something entirely different and up to you in how you interpret that) on your face and body. It is much the same as a new mum with stretch marks. It is a marker of life and how you are living it. It is nothing to be ashamed of, on the contrary be proud of who you are. Every decision, thing that you have done and sometimes regret has built the person that is you.
In my time photographing social events I would often get a mix of people that would either point blank refuse or take a little convincing when I walked up to them with my camera asking if I could take their photo for one reason or another. Sometimes peer pressure beat the insecurities, sometimes all it took was some reassurance from myself that I was not out to make them look bad. See, I truly want to make my subjects look good no matter who they are (despite often an overindulgence in alcohol) and I believe that every single human has at least one thing that makes them beautiful and it is my job to help that shine through. Now, when there was point blank refusal I would not under any circumstance spend a considerable amount of time flogging a dead horse but always if there was a hint of it I would pursue the value of having a photo with friends, loved ones and moments of life being lived.
Those good and bad times make up a life and that life is worth capturing. You don't have to always "look your best", it simply isn't reality. Be as real as possible. Take the absolute fame of the National Geographic image known as The Afghan Girl. From my knowledge she (Sharbat Gula) was quite unamused by a stranger doing what I tend to call "sniping" the shot. Never photographed before that image and in a time of tension and loss she still remembers her anger in the moment directed towards Steve McCurry. I can relate, the last thing I would personally want would be someone I didn't know photographing my worst times but as an image creator I can also acknowledge the value in those exact kinds of image. They are absolute truth. Reality in it's most raw form. Reality isn't always a posed family image of perfection. Life is not perfect.
An example I can give of my own experience of an image that felt like I was taken advantage of in a vulnerable moment is nowhere near the experience of Sharbat Gula but in hindsight I can appreciate it's existence. It shows me. It was from a 2012 dragon boat racing competition where I used to almost completely shut down and go inside my own head to focus on my job ahead of doing everything I could to contribute to my team's success.
The last thing on my mind was someone running around with a camera and yet, I had my photo captured in that moment. My immediate reaction was one of horrified anger at someone capturing me in that moment, a time when I was vulnerable. With time though I saw it's value in that I can pull that picture up with a sense of pride and achievement showing how seriously I took doing my best in something that was of paramount importance to me at the time.
What does me doing that shutdown or The Afghan girl have to do with my case for ageing? I don't have a whole lot of physical markers for my age yet (they'll come, I am after all a lifelong worrier) but have encountered it numerous times where people seem reluctant to own their lives. If we can embrace ourselves in who we are, completely unapologetically with the markers of our lives, we can be powerful and present. With those two things we have the potential through photography and other time defying ways to become immortal.
To those with the physical markers I have yet to acquire - You did not only exist when you were 20.
- Courtney
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