I have visibly aged by about 100 years in the last month, through fear, worry, helplessness. No wonder then, that a project called The Beauty of Age caught my attention. I was taken not only by the portraiture of numerous people all above 75 years of age, photographed with a gentle lens and loving perception.

It was for me all about the approach to the project which explicitly combined a focus on the photographic portrait with attention to the life experiences behind the faces, the at times unbearable suffering that put my own anguish in perspective.

Laura Zalenga, a young European photographer, supported by the Adobe Creative Residency program, spent 2018/19 interviewing more than 30 people in Germany. Here is her description of the project (my translation from the German.)

“The project contains hundreds of photographs, weeks of listening and more than 2000 years of combined life experience. None of these statistics can capture though the gift these encounters. The wonderful people I met. We laughed together, sat silently with each other, cried softly. I heard so many beautiful, stunning, horrible, funny and sad stories. I sensed such aliveness. Such power and pain and contentedness, so much quietude, loneliness and courage. There is much to discover and learn if we allow the oldest of our societies to say their piece. If we afford them a bit of our hectic time, they return to us a piece of their wisdom, bear witness to our own history and express much gratitude.”

The work, as displayed in traveling exhibition, is a combination of the pictures of the faces and written quotes from the conversations, printed alongside the portraits. A companion book to the exhibition provides more detail.

What struck me, when perusing the photographs in The Beauty of Age was something practically all of the portraits had in common: they pulled their emotional weight without the visual tricks and forced stylishness of so much contemporary portrait photography. Not that the artist doesn’t know how to: she is on top of the contemporary demand for slickness as much as any of the big names these day.

In her project with the aged, however, Zalenga, in her 20s at the time, saw with the heart – she has, I predict, a clearly marked path to success in this image saturated world. These were mostly naturally lit snaps of people in their living rooms or other personal environments. Perhaps because of the naturalness of the approach the photographer captured something essential that is not always there when the sitter is too aware of and tense in the image-taking situation. I am thinking here of the mildness of the gaze. Look at all of their eyes, their expression – softness abounds, despite the hardships in their lives.

What an optimistic thought – we all might be able to come out un-hardened at the other end of life’s crises. I cling to that, while turning my back to the mirror.

This will be my self portrait, then, in the near future….

And here is the Marshallin from Rosenkavalier singing about getting old…