L magazine, In the Arts, March, 2010, Lafayette, LA
Age Before Beauty —
Sometimes the two are not mutually exclusive.
by Patricia Gannon.

Renowned fashion photographer Richard Avedon once said, "Youth never moves me. I seldom see anything very beautiful in a young face." For him, it was the roadmap of experience, the downturned mouth, the tally of days on a mature face that held his interest. Except for the occasional nephew, Avedon avoided photographing those under fifty except for work.

There's at least one other photographer who shares his view. In a culture focused frenetically on staying youthful, Mark Story focuses on age — extreme age. His subjects are centenarians and beyond, and what captures his attention is the power of a face at the end, not the beginning.

Living in Three Centuries: The Face of Age — Photographs by Mark Story is the product of 20 years of pursuing time-worn visages. Story, a commercial film director who has spent most of his own life behind a camera, at first was simply interested in portraits of hard-luck people. "I wanted to get away and have my own project," he said, "a breath of fresh air from commercials." Story's portraits bear no names, a fact that forces viewers to concentrate on age alone. Some have no other identifying information outside of gender and a line or two of geographic origin. The most fascinating contain some evidence of the verbal interaction between the photographer and his subject, like small revelations. Take 110 year and 242 day-old American Man who golfed every week until he was 102.

"I asked what did you shoot at 102?"

He stated, "I shot an 85".

At this, his daughter rolled her eyes. "I don't know how accurate that is. You know golfers always lie about their score."

Others are distilled to the point of becoming small poems. "A 101 year-old Sulish Native American Woman, the oldest living tribe member. Blind, she said she loved handsome men. I asked her how she knew they were handsome. She said, "You just know."

All are compelling.

"You look, read, and move on — the next one, and the next," said Story, who did his utmost to keep text to a minimum on purpose. "I didn't want to add my subjective feelings."

Nor has he. Still, Story's portraits betray a deep sensitivity to human nature. And while none reveal the secret of longevity, long-lived relatives and a lack of worry seem to be contributing factors. Abstinence was not; many subjects were alcoholics or homeless; one dipped snuff until she was 102. All have managed to outwit the degenerative diseases of old age, frequently without doctors or medication. Many bore a marked sense of humor, such as the 110 year-old woman reared on a tobacco plantation but claimed she "never inhaled." Another quipped, it "used to be early to bed, early to rise — now it's early to bed… and just keep breathing."

Story said he's become a better listener as a result of his project and less tolerant of artifice. "It's been pretty interesting," he said of the portraits' web reception. "Someone's writing about it once a month somewhere."

Living in Three Centuries: The Face of Age — Photographs by Mark Story is at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, E. Saint Mary Blvd, [Lafayette, LA, USA] through May 22 [2010].

Link to Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum
  University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Link to L Magazine.

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