Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
and so endeth a week of scary old people in some vague tribute to halloween and the day of the dead – in the 80s there were 2000 people over age of 100 living in the U.K, now there are over 16,000. The current obsession with zombies might be that the living dead are already walking among us. As longevity continues to increase our world might one day be overrun (well, overshuffled) by OAPs. A scary thought if ever there was one. My Grandma always said “there’s no good getting old” and from what I can see she is right. Old age is life, just worse. Health advances are keeping us alive longer and longer as our remit for living seems focussed purely on quantity rather than quality but for what purpose? What’s good at that end?
It’s not that I’m anti-old, it just doesn’t look like a barrel of laughs. And yet, in a society that is obsessed with eradicating all signs of ageing I actually find myself increasingly more drawn to photographing those who bear the battle scars of life. These unironed faces at least have character and tell a story. They teach us that living is hard and just to survive it is a triumph. And they show that even as the body deteriorates the human spirit never does. What did anyone ever learn from a face full of botox?