Salon.com > Ed Kashi

What it means to be old

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 23:12:00 +0000

A shriveled man wearing running shorts and sneakers gracefully pole-vaults at the Senior Olympics. A 58-year-old woman in a thong spreads her legs in a wide split at the Miss Exotic World pageant. An elderly veteran, who suffers from arthritis, high blood pressure, and the aftereffects of a stroke, stands in his kitchen while his son swaddles him in a diaper. These are just a few of the bold, unflinching images in "Aging in America: The Years Ahead," a new book by photographer Ed Kashi and writer/producer Julie Winokur.

By mid-century there will be more Americans over 55 than under 18 -- a startling demographic shift that will have huge social, economic and cultural implications. With this in mind, Kashi and Winokur spent seven years traveling across the United States recording the stories and pictures of a segment of society that is often invisible: the aged. "We wanted to dispel myths about growing old," says Winokur. "Because too often the elderly are portrayed as caricatures rather than complex individuals."

Loners of America

Backfire

Mon, 22 Apr 1996 17:51:00 +0000

Every day since the Israeli offensive against Lebanon began, Hezbollah fund-raisers drive up and down Hamra Street, the chic commercial center of West Beirut. Patriotic songs blare from the loudspeakers atop their flag-bedecked Mercedes Benzes. Passers-by, not just the veiled, bearded Shiite Muslims, but Greek Orthodox, Maronite Christian, tonily dressed cosmopolitans, unhesitatingly empty their pockets into the Hezbollah collection boxes. More money for more Katyusha rockets to rain down on northern Israel.

At a Hezbollah cemetery in a poorer Beirut neighborhood, a 17-year-old girl, the victim of Israeli helicopter gunship fire, is buried to the accompaniment of screams and curses from the living hurled against Israel and the United States. On day five of the assault, my Hezbollah guide tells me not to come around any more. "It's not safe here because you're an American," he says.

A Lebanese employee of Motorola tells me that all the imported executives at a plant here have been sent home. Once again, it is not safe to do business in Beirut. Israeli helicopters knocked out a power relay station and a domestic fuel depot as Lebanese anti-aircraft guns waved back and forth fruitlessly. Any hope of recovering from 17 years of war, civil and otherwise, have been set back months, maybe years.

Jewish settlers

Sat, 02 Dec 1995 16:49:00 +0000

As the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has shown, militant Jewish settlers in the West Bank present a formidable obstacle to the country's quest for peace with the Palestinians. While Hamas and other Arab terrorist groups wage war on the peace process from without, a group of extremist Jewish settlers, unmoved by their government's policies or public sentiment, are waging war within.

Over the past two years I have been documenting the lives of these settlers. Passionately motivated by the ideology of Zionism, they view themselves as ordained by God and the Torah to reclaim ancient land, which they refer to not as the West Bank but by its biblical names: Judea and Sumaria. Yeshiva students here take self-defense as seriously as Torah studies. A simple trip to nearby baths or vineyards is an armed excursion. Mobile homes are crane-lifted into place in defiance of Israeli law. These settlers will not willingly move off the land and let their dream of a "greater" Israel be destroyed.