Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines Artist Talk with Danielle SeeWalker

Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines looks at the social and ethical implications of the observational image and challenges some of the myths and misunderstandings often imposed upon elder members of contemporary western societies.

Aging Bodies… speaks to how photography has influenced our perceptions of the human organism relative to the passage of time, to the many ways the medium has become instrumental to the construction, preservation and revision of personal and collective memory, as well as to photography’s ability to obscure and elucidate notions of falsehood and truth.

This exhibit operates somewhere in-between two representational tropes; those who adopt an heroic attitude towards the aging process, seeming to remain ‘forever youthful’ and those who experience significant bodily decline and illness to the extent that the outer body is seen as misrepresenting or imprisoning the inner self.

Both modalities serve to objectify and therefore skew our capacity to empathize with those depicted. Such pervasive imagery of the elderly as either sub or super-human beings form part of a repertoire of the ‘pornography of old age’ within consumer culture. To be clear, these are not the points of view this exhibit is hoping to advance.

Aging Bodies… does not claim to be an exhaustive study in either gerontology or the mechanisms of representational bias. It does, however, deliver a small selection of playful, critical and tender images made by and about elder artists; redirecting viewers back to the lived body and divergent self-images of the middle aged and old.