Kaylynn Deveney captured the daily tasks the elderly Albert Hastings carried out on a daily basis by photographing him in a very tender way: the warmth in their photographer-model relationship is abundantly apparent. There seems to have been a shared sense of wry humour despite the generation gap. The addition of the captions from Albert recorded in a notebook by Deveney, allow the viewer a sense of his character which makes the images much easier to engage with. It also allows Hastings to project his own voice to the images, and the resulting work is therefore clearly a joint collaboration. I’ve selected a couple of my favourites below:-
The dominating object in the photograph, the plain brick wall, against Hastings’ lily-white sun-thirsty body, basking on his tropical coloured towel atop the grim grey concrete is delightful in a Marin Parr ‘British eccentricity’ kind of way.
The image above would probably be unremarkable without Albert’s little quip about the ghost. This is an example of where the caption has really enriched the photograph and made it much more about how Albert could eek a little bit of joy out of everyday objects in his home.
Sources
Deveney, K. (2007) The Day to Day Life of Albert Hastings. At https://kaylynndeveney.com/the-day-to-day-life-of-albert-hastings. Accessed on 2/1/2017
