Old Enough to Know Better

This project was originally an interactive CD-ROM and a series of portraits.

I wanted to make a series of portraits of women and record their histories in order to represent what is,missing in our visual culture: pictures of older women.

By getting women to talk about the men in their lives, their fathers, brothers, boyfriends, husbands, lovers, their sons and close friends, I have focused the piece on their emotions and feelings about gender and sexuality.

These stories reveal hidden women’s narratives. I made a collection of portraits of London women over retirement age and used two of those women to make a pilot CD-ROM. I interviewed the women and re-photographed their family albums, as well as photographing them in some of their daily activities, with some of their everyday objects. I interviewed them and I made the CD-ROM so that the viewer could listen to their stories about men in different sections of their lives, whilst looking at pictures of then and now. Memories in life occur in non-linear fashion, so it seemed appropriate to use CD ROM for this archive.

"'Old Enough to Know Better' is unique in the way that it opens the family photographic album, in that it tells us stories of two seemingly ordinary, but extraordinary women in their own voices, in their own times, in their own ways. This is not your normal CD-ROM" — Peter Ride, Art Programmer for Artec, London.

The whole project was shown at Cambridge Darkroom, Saatchi & Saatchi, London and as part of the Fotofeis festival at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland.

The original CD-ROM was made on now outdated technology, but was converted and restored through the kind assistance of Ron Rogerson.

In the credits you see the digital help I was given to enable this project by students of Digital Media at University of Westminster.