Limited Woman (Substraction of full article)
"Whatever happened to ageing gracefully?" - Miranda
"It got old" - Carrie
Sex and the City
And with that the case is closed, killer lines from 1999.
It's no news people have an obsession with anti-ageing, something that lies at the heart of 'homo sapiens' civilization, but has perhaps been magnified over the last century.
What lies at the biological essence of our existence is ironically the one thing we are all trying to fight.
Even at the beginnings of written history, there is Alexander the Great and his quest for the fountain of youth, which many after him have tried to find.
Anti-ageing can not be seperated from beauty and fashion, open any random magazine and you'll see perfected faces, nearing lifelessness, looking back at you. The misrepresentation reaches from retouched photographes to models aged 13 - 20 trying to sell anti-wrinkle creams for 40plus agegroups.
One scary thing I came across the other day was 'The New World' on Discovery Channel, where scientists were talking about the very real possibility that there will be pills on the market combatting old-age within 30 years. This would triple our current life expectancy.
When I think about ageing and society nowadays, it has a certain sadness attached to it. We often look at it as a limitation, something we need to fight to our last breath.
For the photoshoot 'Limited Woman' I tried to project this sadness on a young model, represented in an old age home where we held the shoot; taking a beauty we are familiar with and projecting this on a very 'unbeautiful', yet natural prospect.
But for every negative, there is also a positive. To balance the gloom, there is inspiration to be extracted from the subject of ageing as well. On a positive note I present this study on materials and stop-frame filming:
