An interview from issue fifteen.

Last year, Kristin Perers turned fifty. She’s a portrait photographer who’d earlier had a career in fashion design. Growing up and growing older, images of women her age were part of the visual landscape. From models to actresses, there they were­—at eighteen through to forty—in magazines and on billboards.

Until she turned fifty, that is. Accompanying her into middle age were the same images of youthful beauty only this time they didn’t reflect Kristin’s stage of life. “What does fifty look like?“ she asked.

To find out, she embarked on a year-long portrait series called This Is 50. Every two weeks, she photographs a woman in her fifties. Kristin doesn’t aim to capture a woman who’s happy, sad, young or old at fifty. Rather only to have a conversation in expressions and gestures: to let the camera do the talking. 

When did the idea for This Is 50 come to you? I got married two and a half years ago and, when I moved house, I found a photo of me aged eighteen at my debutant party. It’s an old-fashioned thing, the debutant ball, and this was in a rinky-dink tiny town off the coast of Florida. I was on a threshold of becoming, I wouldn’t say quite a woman, but a grown-up. I hit fifty in 2012. It feels like I’m at another passageway but, this time, where’s the party?

The photograph took me back to that point and before. It’s interesting because in her teens a girl starts her period and in her fifties, at some point, it will end. But the menopause is something that nobody talks about and that’s a little bit scary. What will it be like? Am I going to fall off the face of the earth and cease to exist? What’s given me hope and inspiration, I suppose, is thinking about myself as a twelve-year-old climbing trees: how free I was, how much fun I had.

You’re thinking back to childhood but the portraits are frank and intimate. They don’t seem to argue that fifty is young. It’s just fifty. I’m not trying to show that fifty isn’t old, that fifty can be forty. I hope this is not a collection of women who look young for their age. Fifty is an in-between age. You can see old age and your youth, past and future. There are glimpses of that in each woman, a moment when she looks sixty and a moment when she looks thirty. I try and find what fifty is, and it’s not defined by how we look.

I’m interested in how differently men and women are perceived as they age. It’s more socially acceptable, somehow, for men to have wrinkles and age publicly. A man’s wrinkles are a sign of his status and power. But with women what we’re taught to value is smoothness, both on the surface and underneath, a blank slate. That’s deemed of value in our society. I go back to when I was a little girl, thinking about my grandmother and her lovely soft skin, her jowls, the smell of her, and just how beautiful she was. Never for a second did I think, “Wouldn’t Grandma be prettier if only she pulled just a little bit of that skin back.“

Before you start to get educated by ideas of what is attractive, your vision is completely different. When you become a teenager, you start to have images played back at you, and then during your twenties and your thirties. Can I measure up to that, you think? Turning fifty, I’m not seeing that many images of women my age. Suddenly they’re not there anymore. Can we challenge that and see differently?

You incorporate dressing up in the photo shoots, and it ties into the debutants you were talking about. When you dress up you emerge and unfurl. That’s the spirit that you’re trying to capture, I think, not just everyday life. I’m still working it out, but I think dressing up is important. It changes your attitude and it’s fun. I don’t want the project to be about the latest fashion or style, but the way you dress is an expression of what mood you’re in and who you are. It sends off so many signals. And there’s something about a photo shoot that is a little bit like a theatre.

Follow the project online at thisis50.me.