“Skin Deep” is a series of pigment prints that explores female aging through the metaphor of construction debris. This project is an out growth of Hestia’s stories. I started photographing during the pandemic with Sunday shooting trips to residential construction sites near my home. As I looked at the discarded, scrapped, mangled, forgotten, and broken building materials strew on the ground, I began to see the forms and textures of the aging female body – sagging skin, thinning hair, drying membranes.
I’ve shared these images informally for the last four years with friends and colleagues. It’s spurred interesting conversations about sometimes conflicting thoughts and emotions of growing older in a culture that reveres youth: trying to focus on gratitude for a healthy body, coping with sadness at losing a youthful appearance; reckoning with the lack of physical control over the aging process, acknowledging the freedoms that come with aging.
The triptychs are symbolic of the evolution of feelings and attitudes toward growing old. If aging had a color palette, I imagine it would be these pink to rust hues. While the phrase “skin deep” connotes superficiality, my goal for the work is to spur deeper understanding, acknowledgement and a release of the negative thoughts. In releasing the inner voice of this universal experience, I hope to find the beauty of the wrinkles and sags and thinning hair.