The award-winning project | Exhibition dates
Friends are the family we choose.
I’ve always been interested in people — all people — and the amazing ability humans have to find an inner strength to overcome adversity and turn it into something inspirational.
In my work, I document the external world to find meaning and understanding for my internal, unresolved feelings, often bringing the past into the present. It is this liminal space, or borderland, that sparks my creativity. In reflecting on this inner landscape, a personal narrative is created which is located within a larger, shared experience focusing on the juxtapositions of birth and death, youth and age, pain and joy.
It was against this backdrop that I began documenting my father four and a half years ago when his health deteriorated, and I became his carer. If I’m honest, I struggle: just as there is no one manual on how to be a parent, there is even less available information on how to be a carer to a parent. I hadn’t appreciated just how hard growing old alone could be, and I needed to find a way to process my feelings.
I had put my cameras away in the back of my cupboard for 20 years, along with deferred hopes and desires. Secretly, I pulled them out to look at them longingly on days when I felt I’d lost my identity to the demands of parenting, caring, making a living, and putting my photographic career on hold.
I started the work with my father for a few reasons: as a way to share with others who may be experiencing similar difficulties as carers; to explore my emotions and support my mental health; and to reignite my photographic practice. And if nothing else, I felt that my father and I could have fun making pictures on our visits to the Turkish barbers, the cafe on the high street, and on our car trips.
The challenges of Covid
But all this came to an abrupt end with the start of Covid-19 and the government instruction on 16th March 2020 that people over age 70 were to shield.
Suddenly isolation had come to us all. I used my daily exercise quota to cycle the five kilometres to my father’s facility in Milton Keynes where we initially met in the garden. This was the starting point for two photographic projects. The first, Our Lockdown Garden, is a series of distanced portraits and interviews made in collaboration with the residents at my father’s sheltered retirement community. The work memorialises their thoughts as the last generation to experience both the war and Covid 19.
The second project, Love is a Life Story, is a series of black and white photographs taken between March 2020 and May 2022. It is a highly personal project that documents the friendship between two nonagenarians, my father John, and his friend and neighbour, Mary. It intimately chronicles the everyday life and challenges they faced as they navigated the various, often confused, Covid-19 lockdown regulations whilst living in their retirement facility.
At the time, older people were seen by some in power as expendable. In the early days of the pandemic, the government unlawfully discharged untested hospital patients in England to care homes which went on to record thousands of excess deaths. This apparent disregard for our oldest citizens prompted me to document what I was witnessing daily — not only as a daughter and carer to my father, but also as a photographer.
John and Mary’s experience epitomised everything that I felt was unjust about the treatment of our oldest citizens. My father was already suffering isolation and loneliness when Covid restrictions sent him deeper into despair. Sadly, his situation was not unusual. Following an Amnesty International investigation in 2020, the organisation said “irresponsible” government decisions had led to multiple violations of the human rights of care home residents who were seen as “expendable” — their right to life, to health and to non-discrimination — and it called into question Britain’s already failing care system.
John and Mary both dedicated their lives to helping others — John as a Christian minister and Mary as an NHS nurse. Mary, a salt of the earth Geordie who always called me “pet”, John a Londoner with a humble and peaceful demeanour, brought together through circumstance, age and their shared benevolence. In December 2021, Mary was moved into a nursing home and passed away alone, unable to have visitors except behind glass. She died believing that she had been locked away and imprisoned.
Love is a Life Story is dedicated to Mary and is a testament to the importance of friendship and faith, especially in the face of adversity. Permeated by themes of love and loss, this series of images aims to give voice to a generation who are often overlooked and underrepresented.
I wanted to portray their strength, resilience, and positivity. I was gifted these insights through my father’s retirement community. Together we found beauty in the small everyday things — caring, friendship, faith and sharing. We found beauty in hardship. Bonds were strengthened and neighbours and friends replaced family. As the wonderful poem by Benjamin Zephaniah says, people need people, and I felt this more than ever while making this work.
Their faith, their memories and their friendship became their companions like never before. Through this I learnt that what we leave behind are the stories we tell. I was given a beautiful insight into friendship and love in the final decade of life.
Our bodies grow old, but our hearts long for the same things. And why not? Society doesn’t like to talk about ageing and even less about death, but I believe it’s an important dialogue to have. This project exemplifies the beauty in ageing and Mary and John show us how to “do it well”.
New memories
I shot each image in landscape because I had a vision of the work flowing like a book, a story book. Each day we turned a new page and it was more of the same Covid-19 restrictions, but I created new images and memories and time with them.
The work has a beginning and an end in the physical sense, but not in the spiritual sense because that is eternal. Both John and Mary had a strong faith and held on to that. They both believed that the end was just the beginning.
My father’s story continues, so in that sense this project is a verse or chapter within the bigger, unfinished tale. I recorded John and Mary’s voices and our conversations on my phone. I listened a lot. The project is shot entirely on film, in natural light using my old 35mm Nikon cameras.
I continue to photograph my father’s life amidst this backdrop and the pressure put on unpaid family carers of whom there are approximately five million in England and Wales.
__________
The story
__________
About Ruth Toda-Nation
Ruth Toda-Nation’s photographic practice is informed by a nomadic childhood bridging two cultures, Japan and Britain. She began photographing in Liverpool in the 1980s and later in the rural areas of northern Japan. She continues to document communities in the UK where she lives.
Her intimate approach interweaves themes navigating family dynamics and community bonds while reflecting on ageing, loneliness, transience, and departure. Ruth brings a unique perspective to her photography using images and words drawn from interviews and conversations with her subjects.
She gives voice to people and communities through allowing their stories to unfold and invites the viewer to grasp the spectrum of pain, sadness, joy, and happiness they experience.
Ruth’s first photo-text book, Our Lockdown Garden, was published by The Mindful Editions in 2022.
__________
Exhibition dates
As a winning project in the Royal Photographic Society’s Documentary Photography Awards 2023, Love is a Life Story is part of a UK touring exhibition beginning in May 2024.
The exhibition can be seen at:
- London: Nunnery Gallery, 7th to 21st May
- Inverness: Eden Centre, 1st to 27th June
- Stirling: The Stables Gallery, 1st to 31st July
- North Wales: Oriel Colwyn, 3rd to 30th August
- Newcastle: Newcastle Arts Centre, 5th to 30th September
- Oxford: St. John's College, 7th to 28th October
- Bristol: RPS House, 17th January to 9th March 2025.
For more details, visit the RPS Documentary Group events page.
Please check dates and times with individual galleries before attending.