To Grow Old with You

I started To Grow Old with You as a senior project at BYU in the spring of 2012. The idea was simple, almost embarrassing in its simplicity: photograph couples who had been married longer than I had been alive, and ask what they knew.

What they knew, it turned out, was hard to put into a single sentence, but it was easy to see in a face. Two people who had spent fifty, sixty, seventy years choosing each other have a particular way of standing in a room. You don’t have to ask them about it. You just have to stand still and listen with a camera.

The first frames went up at the Harold B. Lee Library that spring. The project got picked up by Country Living, HuffPost, Yahoo, and National Geographic Your Shot soon after. None of that was the point. The point was making the photographs in the first place — sitting in living rooms with people who already knew the ending, and asking them to tell me what the middle looked like.

The series is still going. I add a couple every year or two, when the right pair finds their way to me. The plan is to keep making it until I’m old enough to be one of the people in front of the camera. Then I plan to keep making it after that too.

This is the project that taught me what photographs are for. Everything else I shoot — weddings, editorial, commercial — comes back to one quiet afternoon, a window full of light, and two people I had just met who were, for the first time in a long time, being asked.