Capturing their moments: Photography exhibits in Winston-Salem center seniors, veterans by empowering them with cameras

Featured photo: A senior photography student poses with the exhibit. (Photo by C. Stephen Hurst)

How many times a day do we whip out our phones to slip a sliver of our lives into our camera rolls? The thousands of photos sit in our virtual galleries as preserved memories.

But older adults, who may not own smartphones, have less opportunities to capture what’s meaningful to them. That’s where teachers at Sawtooth School for Visual Art come in. 

“How can I make the barrier of tech low?” 

That’s the question C. Stephen Hurst, director of photography at Sawtooth, asked himself when planning a program for older adults who recently had their photo works displayed in the exhibit, A Photographic Journey of Winston-Salem as Told Through the Eyes of Her Elders, at the Intergenerational Center for Arts and Wellness. The first iteration of this program’s photos were displayed in April; the second was up through October. 

Community donations of point and shoot cameras contributed to the success of the program in which seniors were encouraged to take pictures of things in their lives for the exhibit. And in Winston-Salem, the possibilities were endless, Hurst says.

Hurst, who spent decades in New York City, moved to Winston-Salem to be with family around Halloween in 2020.

“There’s opportunities to photograph things that I just wouldn’t have had the opportunity to photograph in New York,” Hurst told TCB. 

Plus, there’s beautiful light here, he said, with fewer big buildings towering overhead. There are so many artists in New York trying to make it, but in Winston-Salem, people are “practicing their craft.”

“In many ways, I find it more creative here than in New York,” he said.

“What I’ve found is a lot of times seniors are somewhat forgotten, or their knowledge base is not appreciated, or their way of seeing,” Hurst said. “It’s always about, like, ‘How can we take care of you?’ as opposed to, ‘Let me hear your voice outside of special occasions when there’s something to commemorate.’”

Despite having creative agency, the gap in technology use can pose barriers for older adults to create art.

According to a 2021 Pew Research poll, only 61 percent of adults 65 and older own smartphones compared to 96 percent of adults aged 18-29.

Plus, operating a camera can seem daunting to people of all ages.

But Hurst found that the  students, many of whom had spent decades or their whole lives in Winston-Salem, were in tune with the city’s landscape changes over the years.

One student took a photograph of a Walgreens. While at first glance the subject appeared random, the student revealed that the land the pharmacy stood on was once the home of the student’s church.

“The only thing that commemorates [the church] is a little plaque that’s about 50 feet away from the front door of the Walgreens,” Hurst said. “But if you didn’t know that, you’re just going in to get your toiletries and whatever.”

The insight and memories of older Winstonians give the photos a deeper sense of history.

“When you’ve lived long enough to have people around you pass away, you know that life is fleeting. And so maybe there’s more of an appreciation for the everyday,” Hurst explained, adding that he loved the “merging of the photograph with the story within the photograph” that students brought to the classroom.

The students also took photos of objects that were meaningful to them. One shot depicted a plant that has survived for 25 years, one that was given to the photographer at her husband’s funeral.

“That’s really powerful, the fact that she still has a part of him in this thing that’s in her living room,” Hurst said.

The photo’s story struck a chord with him and the other participants.

“There’s beauty in the everyday, and I think sometimes we kind of forget that,” he said.

Another observation Hurst had from working with this group was that the photos they took weren’t like social media influencers’, it wasn’t about “chasing likes” for them.

“They were just trying to create moments.”

Although the exhibit by the seniors has since come down, the space at the center will soon be occupied by photos taken by a new group. This time, military veterans were behind the camera, gathering each week to share their photos and stories. The exhibit will focus on “seeing the world through their eyes and what the military has taught them about life,” Hurst said. A reception will be held from 1-2 p.m. on Nov. 13 for the exhibit and will be up until spring. Both programs are part of Sawtooth’s Art + Wellness studio which is partially funded by the Greer Foundation, making it free for all of the senior and veteran students.

Hurst’s father served in the military and his mother worked for the veterans administration as a nurse and worked with paraplegics and quadriplegics.  

Hurst recalled a high school project where he was instructed to interview someone at his mother’s workplace. He got paired with a medic who told him that his job was to fly in after battle and “patch people up.”

“He said, ‘You would hear someone screaming and you would go over there, and then you would just have to walk away from them because you knew that their injuries were so lethal that there was nothing you could do to save them, and you had to save the ones that could be saved,’” Hurst recalled. “I wasn’t expecting that as a 14-year-old, to hear something so dramatic, but at the same time I recognized that when he was talking to me, he was there.” 

Even though years had passed, the medic was transported back to that experience.

“That just left a really powerful impact upon me that people in service and the things that they have to live with, like in a snap they can go back 10, 15, 20 years to that space and that place, and how that must affect them long-term,” he said.

That’s why, like with the seniors, Hurst hopes that this new exhibit will allow the veterans to explore parts of their lives and their pasts through the lens of photography.

“It made me think about, like in certain ways like with this project, there’s always going to be something under the surface,” Hurst said.

The Intergenerational Center for Arts and Wellness is located at 114 W. 30th Street in Winston-Salem. To learn more, visit generationscenter.org. 

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