Missoulian Entertainer, June 2006
Lines of Time and Tenacity
by Simone Ellis

Mark Story's "Living in Three Centuries" is all together a touching, shocking, scary, beautiful and poignant collection of photographic portraits. The faces in this show are like masks — revealing much and hiding more.

The minute you walk into this small but spacious gallery downtown, wizened faces emanate more wisdom than you can even comprehend at first glance.

A jaw-dropping experience reaches out. The accumulated and yet individually unique experience captured here, pulls you in and compels — or repels — you, inevitably giving you a sense of gratitude and respect for these primordial looking humans beings.

"Living in Three Centuries" is a show of emphatic head shots, shot using a deep black background and lighting placed just right to bring out the maximum number of wrinkles. Each life-sized face is pushing the edge of the picture frame, making the experience extremely intimate. These images — even from the street — are impossible to ignore and almost difficult to witness. They are also very technically beautiful, in the lineage of Paul Strand or Edward Weston's black-and-white photos.

Story also makes high contrast black-and-white images, shot with traditional emulsion, but his were then digitally printed using Piezotone selenium pigment inks on Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm acid-free paper.

For nearly 20 years, in between productions, the successful commercial media creator, Story, has retreated into his creative mind and traveled the world looking for centenarians, of which there are some 250,000 total (out of 8 billion people!). More recently, Story has been finding super-centenarians, which means that the elder has lived to be at least 110 years old.

His mission? To photograph the manifestation of human aging.

Story has purposely traveled across ethnic and cultural lines, and one of the more interesting aspects of this exhibit is that it shows that age breaks down ethnic distinctions. Whatever culture these individuals have come from, they all look a little like fingerprints here.

The show represents — to name a few:
  a 112-year-old African American WWI vet
  a 102-year-old Chinese woman who lived her entire life in one mud house in Beijing
  a 106-year-old Coeur d'Alene Native woman in a dapper hat with a twinkle in her eye
  a 105-year-old Italian man born in Sicily who came to America 101 years ago
  a 108-year-old English man who grew up in Montana, who still walks a mile to church every Sunday wearing a pink tie and a Stetson.

Intermixed (very interestingly) are images of people who look old but are in fact 42, 46 and 50 years old. It is fascinating and a little disturbing to see the aging process documented in such a way as not to miss that it is the quality of life that is worn on one's face after all.

An image of a 104-year-old Navajo elder, simply titled "#2," tells a tale that is larger than any narrative. It is epic simply by the lines that make up her expression. It is as if hundreds of expressions were criss-crossed in her defiant face. Her story is simple: Mark Story tells us in a very simple, almost poetic text that she lives near the rim of Canyon de Chelly, Ariz. That "she sat for twenty minutes in 24-degree weather in a thin jacket while being photographed," and Story complained that his fingers couldn't move, she said, "It's not cold."

That's it. That's all he tells us. And that's all he needs to. The epic map of the human face is the very essence of this work. No amount of backstory can top that.

The show at Gallery Saintonge is the very first exhibit of this remarkable photographer's long journey during which time he collected 15,000 images worldwide*. It is accompanied by an attractive book filled with many more images and informative text.

The faces on exhibit at Gallery Saintonge take on all obstacles — and what's more the way they are done is lovingly, spiritedly and expertly.


* [This was the first exhibition of Story's complete portrait project.]

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