WOMEN HOLDING

Their numbers are growing globally. Older women increasingly find themselves left home alone by spouses who predecease them and grown children who leave to find better jobs. With candor and sensitivity, I have been chronicling these isolated, aging women in Romania and Bulgaria. This project is ongoing. In portraits honoring the effects of time etched into their wrinkled skin, swollen hands, and bent bodies, I express the tenacity of these solitary women. Each one is the keeper of their family’s history, a living legacy of an antiquated culture on the brink of disappearance. While my portraits clearly express admiration for the determination that these eighty- and ninety-year-old women bring to their daily routines, they also expose the glaring precarity of their lives. For those surviving in isolated pockets with no social network, familial assistance, or governmental safety nets, the circumstances are foreboding. Feminization of aging is not a niche. Women comprise the majority of the oldest old, and millions will spend part of their later lives living alone. My photographs take the necessary first step toward awareness of such menacing circumstances. Bolstered by statistical data attesting to a growing worldwide problem, my work is at once a cautionary tale and a call to arms. With rapidly aging populations, we ignore this escalating problem at our peril. My portraits, at once empathic and quietly agonizing, implore us not to forget about our elderly. These elderly women represent the human spirit of womanhood- the keepers of love of family, triumphs and disappointments, and the history of what was. This is becoming one of the defining social stories of the 21st century.