Do older people, the elderly, lose their abilities because they are elderly or because they feel like older people and are they treated as such? This is the question that an article in The New York Times Magazine tried to answer and was illustrated with the images we bring you today.
Made by photographer Zachary Scott, together with a team of makeup artists and digital retouchers, they created a funny series of images with young children as protagonists, become elderly, in order to show that people's age is not always one's real age, even when that person doesn't even know it.
About the photos
There are six images that were achieved through the use of makeup, children, patience and a good dose of photo retouching. With all this, the series of photos managed to capture the difference between the end of people's lives and those lives that still have a lot left. This is precisely what the article that I comment, and that I recommend, was intended to capture.
Are the elders or are they made?
I will not extend much because it is a blog for babies and not for the elderly, but I found it extremely interesting and I think it is relatively extrapolated to our lives and even to our way of educating children, and that is why I comment . In the article of The New York Times Magazine they talk about several studies done with older people who are created a need, or a motivation. They give as an example one in which a group of grandparents of a nursing home are given some plants and explained to them that they have to take care of them, being they who decide when to water them, where to put them and who, in short, are responsible for keeping them alive. Another group is also given the same plants and they are told that the caretakers will take care of them so they are still alive. Eighteen months later, Twice the elderly of the plant caregiver group were still alive Regarding the group that did not have to do anything for their plants. What made them different? Motivation, responsibility, knowing useful, feeling that there is still something in the world that depends on them.
Another experiment, conducted in 1981, featured eight 70-year-old men on their way to a house without mirrors, decorated, and with the same elements and tools of the 1959 era. There they had to live five days and the study was based on comparing their abilities and skills before entering and after leaving. The hypothesis said that, if the researchers were right, the eight men would come out better than how they entered, by having them relive in a time they lived 22 years ago, when they were much more autonomous and capable.
They were right. After five days the change was important. They lived five days in the illusion that they were younger and behaved as such. Upon leaving, as I say, they surprised everyone. One of them, who had entered wheelchairs, came out with a cane. Another, who was not able to put on some socks without help, organized the dinner of the final night, moving around the dining room with joy and skill. The others walked more erect and looked younger. They were the same age, but in their minds they were no longer that old. Something like that they wanted to capture the creators of the movie "Up", whose protagonist, Carl Fredricksen starts the film almost incapacitated and ends it much more agile and without the need for walking support.
That is why we can ask ourselves if our elders are sometimes as they are because they believe they are, because we make them believe they are or because they really are. And in the same way, we can ask ourselves if our children, when they behave according to how, they do it because they are really like that or because they believe or feel they should be that way. The difference between all this? What I comment, motivation, having a goal, feeling part of something, knowing useful. All this makes the elderly live more jovial and that children develop much better than if, for example, parents are their stewards.
The rest of the photos
Sorry. I know you came in just to see the photos and I've finished explaining things about older people, I leave you with the rest of the photos of the series:
