Photographer produces a rich portrait of aging

A dozen years ago, at age 70, Marna Clarke had a dream. She was walking on a sidewalk and rounded a corner. Ahead of her, she saw an end to the path and nothing beyond.

It was a turning point for Clarke.

“I realized, ‘Oh my God, I’m nearer the end than the beginning,’” she said.

Soon, she was seized by a desire to examine what she looked like at that time — and to document the results.

Clarke, a professional photographer decades before, picked up a camera and began capturing images of her face, hair, eyes, arms, legs, feet, hands and torso. In many, she was undressed.

“I was exploring the physical part of being older,” she said.

It was a radical act: Older women are largely invisible in our culture, and honest and unsentimental portraits of their bodies are almost never seen.

Before long, Clarke, who lives in Inverness, Calif., turned her lens on her partner, Igor Sazevich, a painter and architect 11 years her senior, and began recording scenes of their life together.

Eventually, she realized they were growing visibly older in these photographs. And she understood she was creating a multiyear portrait of aging.

The collection that resulted, which she titled “Time As We Know It,” this year won a LensCulture Critics’ Choice Award, given to 40 photographers on five continents.

“There is a universality and humility in seeing these images which remind us of the power of love and the fragility of

“There is a universality and humility in seeing these images which remind us of the power of love and the fragility of life.” — Rhea Combs of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery

life,” wrote Rhea Combs of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, one of the judges.

Early on, some people were offended by the images Clarke displayed at galleries in the San Francisco Bay Area, near her home.

“I found out there’s a taboo about showing older adults’ bodies — some people were just aghast,” she told me in a phone conversation.

But many people in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s expressed gratitude.

“I learned that older people are dying for some kind of recognition and acceptance and that they want to feel seen — to feel that they’re not invisible,” Clarke said.

Art has many benefits in later life, both for creators and for those who enjoy their work. It can improve health by expanding well-being, cultivating a sense of purpose, and countering beliefs such as the assumption that older age is defined almost exclusively by deterioration and decline, Dr. Gene Cohen wrote in “The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Sec

COURTESY OF MARNA CLARKE As her partner, Igor Sazevich, lay dying, Marna Clarke says, she “was talking to him and caressing him. Then I sat with him and held his very swollen hands. Over and over again, I told him I loved him. I know he heard me.”