Homogenized Family, 2022

This series acts as a portrait of both my maternal and paternal grandparents. I photographed them in their home environments to gain a better understanding of how they spend their time now that they are retired. The project displays how similar my grandparents are to each other. For both their shoots, my grandmothers happened to be decorating for Christmas (both are Catholic) while their little dog followed them around and my grandfathers sat in a recliner. Their rooms were both yellow-lit and cluttered with old photos of family and knick-knacks from the eighties and nineties. Their homes seemed to be an extension of them: warm, silly, quirky, old, and cozy. This series calls into question the homogenization of the elderly generation once they are retired; is this shift towards a slower lifestyle a product of how my grandparent’s generation has been conditioned, or are they so similar because their children found each other as partners?