With Time
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In a photograph by Leonard Freed, a couple carefully studies a canon at a historical site; in Ken Heyman’s “Women Waiting for Fishermen Husbands to Return” a group of older women keep watch over a young child; in a self-portrait by Nicholas Nixon, the artist closely studies the topography of his own changing face. These photographs and 20 others comprise the exhibit With Time currently on view in the Museum’s Upper Gallery.
Some of the photographs are portraits, others are more akin to candid photographs of couples or group gatherings. While a few celebrities are in the mix, the photographs in this exhibit are largely concerned with anonymous adults who are neither winning nor losing at aging. Rather than fighting or surrendering, the individuals are simply becoming who they are with time.
If we are fortunate, we will grow older. In an uncertain world, aging is one of life’s few — if unwelcome — constants. At the same time, we exist in a culture seemingly obsessed with youth. Marketing for all manner of “anti-aging” products woos us with the promise of reversing the clock and returning to younger, more vibrant versions of ourselves. For centuries, entrepreneurs and hucksters have offered creams, dyes, supplements, and gadgets that pledge to mask or undo the effects of a life lived in full. In the era of AI-generated imagery, it can be all too easy to take the bait. More recently, a counter-chorus has emerged, one that advocates aging gracefully, embracing wrinkles and grey hair, and practicing gratitude for the discoveries and opportunities of each passing decade. The photographers whose work is included in With Time do not ask visitors to make a choice between these competing possibilities. Instead, their photographs honor their subjects with frankness, compassion, and occasionally humor.
On view in the exhibit are photographs by well-known artists: Nicholas Nixon, Paul Strand, Joyce Tenneson, Henri Cartier Bresson. Other artists may be new to visitors. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, most of the photographs are shown for the first time and offer viewers an opportunity to see these works — and their subjects — in conversation. At its core, the exhibit seeks to open another way of contemplating older adulthood. The photographs offer us an opportunity to think beyond outer appearances and to consider the inner lives of these varied, vital individuals.
This exhibit is presented in tandem with Time Keeping, concurrently on view at the Henry Sheldon Museum, which invites the public to consider “how time is kept, measured, worked, and recorded both individually and as part of collective history.”