The Rooms
We Grow Old In
The Rooms We Grow Old In is a documentary series made from the inside.
I wasn’t visiting a care home, I was living in one, working night shifts, folding myself into the quiet corners where life slows down to a human pace. The photographs come from those years in the Netherlands, mixed with work I made earlier as a live-in carer in the UK. Together they form a portrait of ageing, labour, and the strange tenderness found in places that most people never really look at.
The series moves through bedrooms, bathrooms, corridors, lift rides, and small domestic altars of memory: a note with my name on it, a pair of dentures rinsing under the tap, the shine on the back of an elderly man’s head, disposable gloves hanging like ghosts on a tiled wall. These are not grand narratives. They’re the moments that make up entire lives; the quiet gestures, the routines, the soft collapses of time.
​
What binds the project is proximity. I wasn’t a photographer stepping into a scene; I was part of the everyday machinery that keeps these places running. I learned the rhythms of the residents, their habits, their humour, their silences. The camera became a witness to the invisible labour of care and to the fragile dignity of growing old in institutions built for efficiency rather than intimacy.
​
The Rooms We Grow Old In was exhibited during Fotofestival Eindhoven (2024), where it was received as an intimate counter-narrative to the polished images usually associated with elderly care.
This work is my attempt to honour the people who shaped me long before I realised I was documenting them.
​