Photos of Old Animals
The Times the other day linked to an excellent photo project, Isa Leshko's "Elderly Animals". The Times says,
Ms. Leshko was inspired to carry out her project after spending a year caring for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease and is now in a nursing home. She considered documenting the experience through pictures but soon decided against it. “A number of fine-art photographers have gone that route and produced really powerful work,” she said. “It just didn’t feel like the appropriate response for me. I didn’t think my mother could provide consent, and I wanted to be present as her daughter and caregiver.”
Richard Avedon's upsetting photos of his sick father come to mind, and Phillip Toledano's "Days With My Father", which began as an award-winning website and was published last year as a book.
I'm particularly interested in Leshko's "Elderly Animals" because it's a novel subject, and because I typically find animals childlike, and the old animals in her photos are both recognizably old and still cute and innocent.