I am feeling nastolgic today as I dip into all of my old archives from college. On this day I was a young twenty-something, maybe at the midway point to graduation, and I decided to go to Olive Gardens Retirement Community in Santa Barbara, CA for an assignment on photographing "strangers" with a common thread. I remember walking around from room to room and how different each one felt. These are permanent residents with entire histories behind them. You could tell the belongings they keep with them were the essentials of what's left of their previous long term homes they had to leave behind to come here. I loved this place for that. Retirement homes can be so sad, you picture an adult person's individuality being stripped away after an entire life of being who they are. But these rooms weren't sterile and without character of the human and I thought that was great. You could almost look at the room, expand it to a full house, and fill in the gaps with your mind to picture that man or woman as a young person and how they lived their lives, only now the rooms are also filled with the idiosyncrasies of being a senior citizen, e.g. waste basket by the chair and walker by the bed. They all had such great stories to tell and were so happy to have a young visitor. As all of these folks are no longer with us, I'm sure, I'm glad I got to spend some time with them. I went to 20 rooms that day and got to feel the uniqueness of all 20 of those people to take and keep with me. It was a win win for everyone. I decided not to do any editing to them (as i wouldn't have back then.) I like them in the raw form of a college student who hasnt yet learned that more often than not, what you see is not actually what you get in the modern photographic world. (Photos by Michele Crowe)
