Mix with people of all ages to combate discrimination!
It is important with more diverse images of older people in order to counter ageism.
Three questions to British photographer Alex Rotas on the challenge and opportunities in covering World Master Athletics.
Why did you choose to focus on older people?
I chose to focus on older people when I turned 60 and found myself entering that category (‘older’) myself. I had already started looking at images of sportsmen and women and comparing the different ways that the two were represented visually in the media, in my academic work, and I thought it would be fun to turn my attention now to how older sportsmen and women were pictured. To my surprise, the moment I put that word ‘older’ into the search-bar, even when combined with ‘sportsmen and women’, it completely overrode any other considerations. All I got were depressing images of moribund-looking older people, people who were clearly immobile and in a state of physical decline. That was when I thought that someone needed to present the other side of the story.
As an older sportswoman myself, I knew that there were plenty of us out there who were still extremely active in the sport that we loved. However, the visual narrative around ageing presented an overarchingly depressing picture that was enough to make anyone terrified by the prospect of ageing. There were no joyful pictures of the physical exertion and camaraderie that I knew characterised the sporting events for older people that I had been to.
The story was completely one-sided, and misleadingly so. The record really did need to be put straight. And it occurred to me that this could be a fun and interesting project for me to embark on myself.
You also have an academic career and have done a Master Thesis and then a PhD in visual culture in your 50s – could you please develop the concept of visual culture?
Visual culture is an academic discipline that examines the meanings we give to what we see, to the visual, in other words.
These meanings change across cultures and historical times. The same image of a woman wearing a hijab, for example, can be differently ‘read’ depending on the culture and background you come from, to take a topical example. Or a photograph of someone receiving a covid vaccine can be seen as someone being gifted with the miracle of health or as someone being coerced into putting something into their body (I’m thinking of Djokovic!).
Reading the visual environment as a text is what we learn to do in visual culture. This background has helped inform my photography.
When I started, I knew nothing about how a camera worked but I had some ideas about what makes a powerful image. For example, we are used to seeing athletes in their rather small athletic kit but what we are used to seeing is a young body occupying this kit. So, there is an element of cognitive dissonance at work when we first look at a photograph of someone, let’s say in their 80s, who is wearing this same athletic wear.
We associate sport with youth and old age with infirmity and yet here’s an image that tells an entirely different story! It makes us look twice.
Could you please give your three best tips for students and those who want to combat age discrimination and “the gloomy old stereotypes that circulate in our society around ageing”?
Hmmm, my three best tips for combating age discrimination, huh? These are big questions!
- Mix with people of all ages! I really think living intergenerationally is the best way forwards. It’s certainly the way to discover that people tend to want the same things, whatever their age; in a nutshell, ‘someone to love, something to do, something to look forward to’ as the saying goes. That’s it, really. It doesn’t change, whether you’re 8 or 80!
- Watch yourself when you find yourself coming up with your own internalised ageist beliefs. Ageism is so powerful in our society. It’s very easy to internalise some of the insidious messages it brings. I do it myself and I work in this field! For example I’ve recently had back problems. My first thoughts were that they were to do with my age. Actually they were an injury to my piriformis muscle that can happen at any age, so I’ve been suffering from a sports injury, basically. If you’re young and your parents or grandparents complain of some physical ailment, don’t put it simply down to ‘age’! There’s something going on that hopefully can be treated.
- Go and watch some masters sports events! There’s masters athletics, masters swimming, masters winter sports (skiing, skating etc), masters tennis: you name the sport and there will be competitions for older people who love it. Watch them and get inspired. Find yourself getting excited and optimistic too about getting older! Have a look at the world records for different age groups. The world record for the women’s 100m in the 80-84 year old age group is 16.26 seconds. For men aged 80-84 it’s 14.35 seconds. Could you beat that?
More information
- about Alex Rotas and her photography on her website: https://alexrotasphotography.co.uk/
- about the exhibition No Limits , 5 April – 29 September, at the Urban gallery ‘Hela stadens galleri’, a part of Gothenburg’s 400th anniversary project led by Göteborg & Co., on this website: https://goteborg2023.com/en/event/no-limits/
The exhibition is a collaboration between JMG, AgeCap, Carin Mannheimer’s Memorial Fund and Gothenburg’s 400th Anniversary.