Challenging Stereotypes Around Ageing: Alex Rotas, Photographer

Through her groundbreaking photographic projects such as Growing Old Competitively, in which she documents older athletes, photographer Alex Rotas is challenging stereotypes of old age and helping to create a ‘new ageing narrative’. We talk to her about her work, the perception of growing old in our society and how we can open up our minds to what’s possible as we age…

What prompted you to start taking photographs challenging the ageing narrative?

I’ve done everything later in life and in my 50s I gained a PhD in Visual Culture, where I became familiar with critiquing imagery. Seven years ago, I did a Google search about sport and older people to see what came up. I thought I might write a paper on it.

Results from the search included old people slumped over, in a care home – archetypal things like that. There weren’t any older sporty people retrieved, even though from my experience as a sporty person myself, I knew they were out there, but there was no evidence of them in the imagery, no documentation. There was a real gap, and so I decided to fill it.

I didn’t know anything about photography at the time, so I found a tutor in Bristol and she took me from a standing start. I was very clear with what I wanted to do, which was to take sports pictures. And that in itself was an ambitious ask, in terms of photography anyway – sports pictures involve movement a lot of the time.

I jumped in with sports such as hockey and football and the Growing Old Competitively project was born… I even photographed the World Skydiving Championships last year, which was full of competitors in their 70s, right up to the age of 85.

What is the mainstream ‘ageing narrative’ – and how can we combat this as individuals?

In my university lectures, I always ask my students what connotations the word ‘elderly’ has for them. Answers are inevitably always frail, passive, weak, a bit doddery – and just so full of negativity.

I think we internalise ageism in our society and this starts young, almost from the first fairytales you read that have old crones or passive grannies in them. When I looked at these images of older people in my Google search, I was shocked.

In terms of power, you can’t become what you don’t see. And if you don’t see older people being active, you’re not going to think that you can be. These depressing, moribund images are the kinds of images that saturate the mainstream.

You also have these ghastly ‘elderly people crossing’ signs, with two people, one carrying a cane and the other humped over – and I’d like to personally campaign against the birthday cards you see everywhere that make fun of old people with their jokes about getting old, being past it, or mishearing things.

If you are surrounded by this kind of imagery and messaging, then popular culture can get to you. You’re bombarded by it, no matter what age you are. It’s insidious. To start to combat it, I think it helps to have an ageless mindset yourself, but it’s tiring to have to fight this.

You’ve got to object to it en masse to change it. And it will take time to do this – ageing well is a relatively new thing. Pre-modern medicine you probably didn’t get to ‘decline’, did you? The arc of the older person was different.

Why do you think there is such negativity around ageing?

There are many reasons I suspect. But I wonder, is it fear? Fear, after all, is what makes news. Keeping age as something to fear creates a market for products, from pills to beauty stuff. Fear creates marketing opportunities, after all, and we need difference to make the market capitalism we live in, work.

To constantly see age as something to “put right” is quite effective. Or perhaps when you are in your middle years – in your 30s and 50s – you need to feel your own power and control still and not object to these kinds of portrayals.

There was a piece in a newspaper recently about the film Hampstead, which is a sort of older-age Rom-Com and it said that the “silver pound is ruining British Cinema”, alluding to the run of films like the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel etc. that depict older people and their lives. Messages like that are amazingly divisive, it pits the old against the young. And this is a massively important point – because really, we’re all on a continuum from young to old, not two separate species.

Are things changing for the better at all?

There are changes, for example, people doing wonderful things with children’s books now, to change the whole narrative. But the old fairytales and references in popular culture do go on and on. We have to move on from this though. It would be great to get to the point where we don’t have to compartmentalise photos of “older people doing athletics” and mention their age at all.

However, I think we have got to go through the ‘highlighting the age’ thing at the moment in order to change the narrative and then to normalise it. Things do move on though.

I noticed a few years ago that Radio Four were quilty of this, if they had a play that was written by someone from the Indian subcontinent let’s say, they would flag up the author as an “Indian writers” and the play as part of a “multicultural series” – but they’ve stopped doing that, which is interesting, and now they just introduce the writer and the play.