100: What Time Creates

100: What Time Creates

By Anastasia Pottinger

Beautiful bodies dominate the media. We see perfect bodies showcased daily, but Anastasia Pottinger takes on the body in a form rarely appreciated: the elderly. With insight, skill, and talent as a photographer Pottinger captures the unique beauty, drama, frailty, and history of citizens who have at lived at least a century. These intriguing images invite you to delve into the drama and startling beauty of the human body in its later years. Anastasia Pottinger takes on centenarians – those who have lived 100 years and more – and uses her photography to capture the beauty, frailty, and history evident on the human body. With the close and almost abstract nature of these images, you’re invited to look deeper into the story behind the image to discover there is beauty at every age.

Reviews

Cosmically speaking, a single human lifetime is over in less than a blink of the eye, but Anastasia Pottinger’s photographs remind us of the enduring beauty of our bodies as well as our spirits. Here, the passage of time ceases to be our enemy and instead becomes our silent but constant companion. Fear gives way to acceptance, and somewhere in that acceptance, Pottinger leaves room for gratitude. This is a book you will return to again and again, as the months turn into years and the years turn into decades. May you find something new in its pages every time. – Ellyn Kail, Editor, Feature Shoot

Richard Avedon showed us that everyone is ugly. Anastasia Pottinger is showing us that everyone is beautiful. Thanks – we need both points of view. – Ed Freeman, Photographer

I look at thousands of pictures a day because it is my job. One day I was looking and then suddenly I stopped. Anastasia’s images compel you to stay with them. I closed my eyes and I felt something. The emotion of something I’d never seen before. It was like looking at the human being, both on a very abstract and incredibly sensitive way. That day, I was looking for a visual artistic language to reflect on Aribert Reimann’s opera, Lear, based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, with the idea of bringing other kinds of emotions to the public, rather than only those of the stage. Lear is getting old and tries to look at the future but his past is too present to be erased. Anastasia’s centenarians let you feel in such a concrete way what it will mean to have your past engraved in your skin, all those years of happiness, sadness, disappointment, passion, fear and so many other kinds of feelings mixed by life, until they become your very own unique patterns. – Lise Bruyneel, Graphic Design Editor, Paris Opera, Paris, France