Showing her age, Sukey Parnell- UWL alumni magazine 2017

Feature – Showing her age

My Mother, My Self from Genetic Profile

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Showing her age ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ she demanded. I had been browsing postcards in the National Portrait Gallery bookshop in late January 2012 when a woman thrust a postcard in front of me.

It was a photograph of an old woman. I hesitated. That question – of age, beauty and image – was something I had been pondering since beginning a BA at UWL (then Thames Valley University) in late 2002. An MA and PhD have followed and I am still puzzled. In popular culture, beauty and age are thought to be diametrically opposed to one another so what was my questioner really asking? And what exactly are we calling ‘beauty’ in pictures of older women?

I was struck by a sudden gap. From the many photographs of her as a beautiful young actress she disappears in her early forties, only reappearing when I pick up my camera not long before her death.

The reasons for this sudden vanishing act piqued my interest and I began to explore issues of visibility of older women through my photography and academic research, and through conversation with women in midlife and older age. Recurrent themes in these conversations were a sense of fascination and frustration with photographic images and a longing for visual representation that could do justice to the energy, humour, power and attractiveness of older women that they experienced in everyday life.

In the West, signs of age are considered detrimental to female beauty. Women, unlike men, are identified with – not by – their faces. Whilst for men marks of character are prized, a woman’s character is thought to be innate, static and continuous. Any change, flaw or blemish is considered a detraction, a fall from grace. Whereas in the past ‘feminine’ beauty was configured in relation to sexual passivity – a passivity that has been challenged in contemporary culture – the distance from a youthful appearance is now the conditioning factor in a discourse of beauty that progressively marginalises older women. This gendered double standard is experienced most acutely when framed from within the aesthetics that operate in and through pictorial art. But how do we picture age and the female subject without denying the unavoidable conflicts inherent in growing old?

My early BA projects explored familial dynamics and generational issues and, most profoundly, the death of my mother. Those intimate pictures became a personal rite of passage, a way of countenancing her death and the inextricable bond between mother and daughter. They now constitute part of my wider work with medical students at Kings where we discuss issues of death and dying, care and gender. I use my photography to stimulate debate and question the way we see – or don’t see – old people and older women in particular. In the wake of my mother’s death, I turned my focus to my own generation. My MA project, Women of an Uncertain Age, features portraits and text of women between 40 and 65 years of age and explores a changed sense of visibility that many women experience in midlife. The project tapped into a rising interest in the portrayal of age and ‘femininity’. Two portraits were selected as finalists in the National Portrait Gallery's photographic portrait prize in 2006 and 2007. Age and photographic portrait have continued to be my focus during my PhD where I moved from still to moving image, drawing on my background in theatre-in-the-round to restage and repoliticise issues with images of older women and underlying cultural narratives.

My focus on ageing has grown out of my own experiences of a sudden unexpected psychic change around the age of forty, an event accompanied by the birth of my son, and not long after, the death of my mother. Looking through her archive after her death, 16

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Read more about the London School of Film, Media and Design at uwl.ac.uk/lsfmd

Carrie Floating in Her Garden from Through a Glass Darkly and Women of an Uncertain Age

My academic journey at UWL has allowed me to carry on questioning the relationship we have to age and photographic image. Now my work is spreading out into other collaborative research projects. I was recently commissioned to make portraits as part of a Leverhulme funded project entitled The Ageing of British Gerontology, photographing the movers and shakers in ageing studies in the UK since its creation in the 1970s. It was a wonderful opportunity to apply some of the insights I have gleaned from my prolonged study as a mature student. It also connects to another issue I am passionate about – lifelong learning and continued opportunities for growth in later life. We live in a culture that has lockstepped a three-stage lifecourse – childhood, working life and retirement – into the collective psyche. A retirement mentality constrains individual development and opportunities for continuing to contribute more widely socially and intellectually. But with an ageing population and the demands that creates in the social and care systems, how will we be thinking of our lives in the future?

In The 100-Year Life, Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott suggest that in the future we will think quite differently about work and life choices. They argue that in our rapidly changing workplace, a linear career trajectory will soon be a thing of the past. Life will become multi-stage with people returning to education throughout the lifecourse and will organise work, romantic partnerships and children-rearing less rigidly. Conventional thinking will also change – instead of seeing ourselves as older for longer, we will see ourselves as younger for longer as intergenerational mingling will help us retain youthful 18

characteristics into later age. Their suggestion highlights longer life as the gift it can be, but reflects the underlying negativity associated with being called ‘old’ and the stigma associated with looking our age.

Perhaps the first step towards changing attitudes is to challenge the way we see and picture age. But how? A good place to start is to ask not who we see but what we see. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, wryly notes ‘it is the spectator not life that art mirrors.’ Photographs of others provide us with a mirror into our conditioned responses – what we accept or reject. Confronting and challenging our own responses to the appearance of age paves the way for us to question our attitude to our future older self and imagine, along with it, enriched possibilities for a long life.

Sukey Parnell is an alumna of UWL’s London School of Film, Media and Design. Her work has appeared in national publications such as The Sunday Times, The Independent on Sunday, the Radio Times and a cover and feature on Dame Joan Bakewell in Saga magazine. Private commissions include portrait images for comedian Bill Bailey, and a private book for Sir Bob Geldof to celebrate his 60th and daughter Pixie's 21st birthdays. A picture of Bill Bailey was Photograph of the Month in 2010 and was exhibited in the Comedians: From the 1940s to Now exhibition. Sukey is just completing her PhD at UWL and is a visiting lecturer at Kings College in the Medical Humanities programme.