ABSTRACT
Old age is a concept that lends itself to visual display; in many different books, journals, magazines and exhibitions, it is represented by photographic images that include older people. The words ‘old age’ are often used in reference to a series of such images, or perhaps are included in its title. Sometimes the people photographed are famous and named, but often they are not and then the series resembles a researcher’s sample: the implicit intention is to generalise about old age. The viewer, like the researcher, is able to move from image to image, both reflecting on a slowly accumulating, aggregated sense of what old age looks like and, at the same time, appreciating and analysing the diversity of the presented images.
