London Telegraph, February 3, 2008
THE 100 CLUB —
  Photography Shooting Young, Good-Looking People for a Living Inspired Mark Story's New Passion Project: Finding Beauty in The Oldest Faces On Earth
by Horatia Harrod

At the thousands of casting sessions that Mark Story hosted in the 1970s and 80s, when he was a director of commercials, one thing always struck him: 'The funniest and most interesting people that turned up were the old people who were not actors. It was their faces and how unconscious they were at what they were doing that I really enjoyed.'

Story was the model of a successful advertising creative, whirling round the globe chasing trends and using the young and beautiful to sell things. Yet his experience inspired him to pursue another project with even greater fervour: photographing the oldest people on the planet.

The Gerontology Research Group — which tries to verify and monitor the world's centenarians and super-centenarians (people over 110) — gave him a way in, helping him to find and approach the people he wanted to photograph. He was also drawn to younger subjects who looked older than they were. As he puts it, he would consider shooting any face that looked 'like the wind of emotion had blown on it pretty hard' — faces shaped by complicated or difficult lives.

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Poverty and turmoil marked Story's own Californian childhood, but with his parents' encouragement and his own hard work he escaped, and won a place at Berkeley. What he couldn't get away from was a crushing awareness of society's contempt for the poor, himself included. 'People assume, in many instances, that they're stupid, and they're dirty and they can't express themselves. Having that prejudice bear down on you when you're young brings a lot of unhappiness.'

This goes some way to explaining why Story is fascinated by survivors, the ones who are 'so damned tough it's impossible to squash them'. And in a world where history is written by the victors, Story hopes that the people who've come closest to beating death might have a chance to rewrite what we know about the past. When his subjects were lucid enough to talk they told him 'a lot of things that have never been written in books, and they make you realise history and reality have been distorted'. In these people he found the legacies of slavery, war, depressions and atrocities.

Story's admiration for his subjects is obvious. But years of taking the photographs have made him realise that he doesn't want to set any longevity records himself. 'When I came back from this project I drew up a living will of 50 pages, and nobody — nobody — can keep me alive.' It's a bleak lesson. Later, though, he tells me another thing he's learnt: 'There's an incredible common denominator with people who live to be old, no matter how hard their lives were. They just never felt that anything was so bad that you had to give up.'


* [This individual's age is unverified by the Gerontology Research Group.]

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