Of Love and Home
Of Love and Home is an ongoing photographic series documenting the lives of 80- and 90-year-old couples who continue to live in their own homes. Using the everyday as the site for this work, Beryl Woodrow explores how these couples maintain their independence and purpose given the inevitable health challenges that come with age. As the project grew, she was inspired to create a record of the couples’ worlds, filled with meaningful pursuits, creativity, and love of home and each other.
The artist spent many hours listening to her subjects’ stories as she documented facets of their lives at home, while also reflecting on cultural assumptions about the elderly.
The eight couples Woodrow connected with over four years are her relatives, neighbours, families of friends, and friends of friends. They are middle class, from a wide range of professions, and mentally astute. The resulting series straddles the boundary between portraiture, social documentary, and visual narrative, contemplating the possibilities of what it can mean to be elderly in the twenty-first century in this country.