Anita Roberts - 2017 - Painting by Nora Patrich

One of my most awful pet peeves is the social media comment on a photograph of a woman of a certain age that may have been manipulated to remove skin pores and bags. The comment is “still beautiful”. This is worse than the banal “looking good.”

If I were the woman receiving that “pleasant” comment I would buy a gun and do away with the perpetrator.

My Rosemary is 76 and she does not look like the girl (when that word could be used a man without any criticism) that I married in 1968. And of course I am not the man now that she married then. We have been married for 52 years and one (I, me) learns that outside beauty changes. What remains is the beautiful inside and this inside is even better now simply because I am more familiar with the comfort of knowing what I have in her.

Polaroid - Painting by Juan Manuel Sánchez

 

I am 78 and I love to photograph beautiful women. My desire to snap pictures of women that would now be of the age of Rosemary in 1968 is gone. I want to photograph older women. I want to photograph much older women.

Into the mix came my friend Anita Roberts in 2017 when she was in her mid 60s. She posed with paintings by Nora Patrich (visiting from Argentina) and by he deceased husband (and my friend) Juan Manuel Sánchez.

Ms Roberts revealed all her body and as far as I am concerned she is not still beautiful. She is beautiful. And better still she had the guts to trust me and I believe that is the reason why these portraits are so lovely.