In 1982, at age twenty-five, Nancy Floyd asked herself, “What would it be like to photograph myself every day and watch myself grow older?” So she aimed a 50 mm lens at herself and snapped the first image in Weathering Time, a project that now comprises more than 2,500 photographs.
“Most often I’m by myself in these images, but sometimes I’m with family and friends. As time passes, births, deaths, celebrations, and bad days happen,” Floyd writes. “Pets come and go; fashions and hairstyles evolve; typewriters, analog clocks, and telephones with cords disappear; film gives way to digital; and the computer replaces the darkroom.”
Weathering Time covers almost forty years. (The years 1991, 1992, and 1995 are missing, because Floyd “simply lost interest in the project.”) In 2012, Floyd began reenacting images from her archive to highlight changes over time. The above diptych, “Dad and Me at 65 1984/2022,” is one of those images.
“While this series chronicles my youth to the dawn of my old age,” Floyd writes, “the images also reflect the experiences of my generation and underscore the cultural, technological, and physical changes that have occurred over the past thirty-nine years.”
Nancy Floyd has been an exhibiting visual artist for forty years. Her interests include the aging female body, the passage of time, barren landscapes, and trees. She uses photography, video, and mixed-media to address the ways in which lens-based media can connect deeply with experience and memory. She lives in Bend.
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