ABSTRACT
What can photography tell us about ageing and our attitudes to it? What are the conditions necessary for breaking ageist paradigms in the visual field and promoting an anti-ageist gaze? And how can documentary photography depict – and promote – care? This chapter focusses on such questions through examining the extraordinary work on ageing of Belgian-born humanist photographer Martine Franck (1938–2012). Franck’s extensive body of photographs, dedicated to documenting the lives of older, often marginalised people, in both institutional and domestic environments, has received very little critical attention, yet arguably it occupies a significant place in the history of gerontology in contemporary France. It also provides a rich opportunity to consider the phenomenology of the photograph and the photograph’s potential as a communicative field and promoter of empathy, within the broader terrain of visual gerontology. The chapter focusses closely on Franck’s first photo book on ageing, Le Temps de vieillir (1980), which is constructed as a travel narrative. It also explores the dialogue set up by Franck with French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal La Vieillesse [The Coming of Age] (1970). Franck sets out the impetus for her project as follows: “I wanted to find out why old age is ‘disturbing’ and how people are differently affected by the fact of ageing” (Le Temps 9). The chapter assesses her achievements in bringing us to look differently at older people and argues that she establishes, through her practice of documentary and portraiture photography, an ethics of care.
