Forty, 50, 60. None of those ages bothered portrait photographer Katie Garlock, Cr.Photog. In fact, she celebrated her 60th birthday by participating in a mud run. But 70 was “a kick in the head,” she says. It suddenly sank in that she was no longer middle-aged, and for the first time, she felt bad about it. “When you feel bad, the best way to lift [yourself] up is to do something for somebody else,” she says. So, she decided to offer each of her friends a free portrait session for their birthdays.
What surprised her, though, is how many of her friends did not want to be photographed. Soon after that, she read a quote in an article—“after the Middle Ages came the Renaissance”—and it altered her thinking about the aging process. “Just because you are retired or older and you can’t do the same stuff you used to, there is so much we can still do,” she says. So, she set out to create a portrait series, “The Renaissance Project,” of everyday women aged 69 to 109 who are doing amazing things in the “renaissance” of their lives. Her first subject? Her best friend and running partner Barbara (below, left), who ran the Cleveland Marathon at age 79.
The portrait series includes images of her subjects and text gathered from interviews. The work has been exhibited at her local community center in Westlake, Ohio. At the opening of the exhibition, Garlock gave a talk on her thoughts about aging, and her subjects stood up and shared what it meant to be part of the project. “Everybody needs to be seen, even as you get older,” Garlock says. Her greatest pride is that the portraits empowered her subjects to think about themselves and aging differently. “I was thinking I was too old and not doing anything interesting, and now I’ve realized that I am pretty interesting,” they told her. “You have changed my image of myself.”
Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.
