Teenagers have long bedecked the tiny confines of their bedrooms with posters that celebrate their manifold icons. These 24-by-36-inch artworks have extolled everyone from Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, to Farrah Fawcett sporting a red swimsuit, to Barack Obama gazing thoughtfully in Shepard Fairey’s “Hope.” These posters, while humble, offer a glimpse into teens’ burgeoning aspirations.
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But who among you has seen such a poster that celebrates an older woman? Think about it. Take all the time you need.
It’s a point photographer Nina Covington pondered as she created images for her exhibit #Goals: Representation is Everything. On view through June at the Janet Levine March Gallery at the Gordon Jewish Community Center, #Goals employs the iconography-as-décorphenomenon to glorify a secret many women conceal like a wound: Advanced age. As her 40-and-older subjects sat before her camera, Covington asked them to send a message to their younger selves that could erase the stigma of aging.
“I said, ‘If you could go back to your teenage self and show them a picture to let them know what they’ve got to look forward to when they get to this age, think about what that would look like.’”
In selecting her #Goals subjects, Covington drew from anunconventional social circle she has cultivated, which includes artists, activists, innovators, and cultural outliers.
From a purely aesthetic perspective, the #Goals portraits have been printed in poster format to mimic Covington’s original inspiration of a teenager’s room. These images are imbued with the edgy, elegant, punk-rock sensibility seen in Covingtons’s previous work, such as Machisma, a series for which subjects modeled topless to make a socio-political point.
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From a philosophical perspective, it’s clear that the #Goals images were conceptualized to erase the shame of aging. For their photo sessions, Covington told her subjects not tohide anything they didn't like. The photos were to be about them in their entirety, wrinkles and all. She also urged the women to peer unabashedly into the camera lens as if communicating to a younger self across the gulf of time.
She explains:
“I was like, ‘It’s as if you could show a picture of yourself to your teenage self and be like, look at what you have forward to: This! This is nothing to be afraid of. You’re going to be awesome when you're older! You’re going to be gorgeous and strong; you’re going to have all this knowledge and confidence. This is the picture that’s going to embody that and show who you are, right now.’”
#Goals reveals her strategy. These women don’t peer demurely to one side. They engage. They convey the accumulated power reserved for women of a certain age.
As Covington says, “In that picture, they become someone that some teenage kid wants to put up on her wall and go, ‘That’s who I want to be when I’m 50 or 60.’”
Janet Levine March Gallery, Gordon Jewish Community Center nashvillejcc.org; ninacovington.net