Coffee with sports photographer Alex Rotas
Alex Rotas
Photographer, Alex Rotas Photography
Age: 71
Zoom coffee interview
Introduction
In one of our pre-interview email exchanges, Alex wrote “I’m not having a huge amount of success addressing your interview questions I’m afraid. Can we just wing it and talk it through on the day?” I said, of course! And the resulting interview is a little looser and I think better as a result.
On the day of the interview, Alex wondered aloud if as we age we're less likely to come up with soundbites, partly because we see things in a more nuanced way and partly because doubt creeps in so we want to qualify our answers first.
Loss of confidence has been mentioned by many of the people I have interviewed and so, I asked Alex if she thought, that our hesitation could be attributed to a decline in confidence.
“That’s interesting”, Alex responded “because I feel I've gained confidence. I feel that not being able to come up with a clear black and white answer is, without a doubt, a good thing. I would have been much more sure of myself when I was much younger. And now I'm less sure of myself, but, paradoxically, that makes me feel more confident.”
Looking into this after our interview, I found that research bears this out. As we age, our cognitive functioning slows but also we carry more information in our brains and our thinking is definitely more nuanced. Or as the New York Times puts it in a 2014 article entitled ‘The Science of Older and Wiser’, older people ‘show greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences.
Sometimes these differences are described in terms of fluid intelligence and crystallised intelligence. Adam Grant described fluid intelligence as your raw processing power. Basically your innate capacity for learning and problem solving. Whereas crystallised intelligence is your acquired ability to solve problems by applying your knowledge and experience. (Source: WorkLife with Adam Grant. Career Decline Isn't Inevitable).
Fluid intelligence peaks around the age of 20 and then slowly declines. Whereas crystallized intelligence continues to grow throughout our life showing some decline after the age 60.
Crystallized intelligence really is our superpower so remember speed isn’t everything. It's the quality and thoroughness of our thoughts that have been formed from years of learning and living that can sometimes give us the edge.
And now our interview…
How has your career evolved?
I’m not sure about this notion of a “career”. If you read my CV, it reads like the CV of an insane person!
It follows various tangents that I've been interested in during my life, leading me in what seems like different directions. But from the inside, there's always been a logic and a continuity to my choices.
I certainly haven't had a clear career path. I haven't been someone who, for example, qualified as a doctor and then became more and more immersed in my specific field.
Partly, I suspect, it’s because I love being able to explore new ideas and directions, and I actually like being a beginner. This is something I’ve had lots of opportunities to be! When you’re at the bottom of a steep learning curve, you look ahead at the things you're going to learn and that, to me, feels like a very exciting and optimistic place to be.
My career, if we can call it that, has involved lots of twists and turns! And I recognize that I’ve been very privileged to be able to follow them.
For example, I went back to university in my 50s and did a master's degree in the field of visual culture, and then a PhD, which I completed when I was 56. As I developed my relatively new interest in visual culture and my lifelong interest in sport, I found myself buying my first camera in my 60s, seeking out a photography tutor, and developing the idea of showcasing older athletes. I wanted to present a more positive visual view of aging than the one I was currently seeing predominating in the media at the time.
Now in my 70s, I’ve left my academic career behind and I travel the world meeting and photographing extraordinary individuals who still compete in the sports they love, right through to the age of 100 and above. I’m truly having a blast!
What decision or experience helped you follow your passion.
Again, I can't say I made the big decisions. What's that expression, “life happens to you, while you're busy doing other things?” This has been very much my experience!
I really enjoyed a part of my life in my late 20s. I was living in Greece and I set up a center for preschool deaf and hearing-impaired children. In many ways, this was one of the most rewarding periods of my life, but then my marriage collapsed. And I ended up coming to the UK.
I had an American degree in special education that wasn't recognized in the UK so I couldn't go on doing the educational work I was doing in Greece. I had to start again and do what I could.
So none of that turned out as planned.
In my 40s, I worked in a hospice in Somerset, setting up an educational training programme for people working with the dying. I found this very different work and extremely rewarding too. However, there was a very strong work culture in the institution I was working in at that particular time, and I ended up getting ill. So that was another bit of a disaster, because I just imploded, so to speak, and I had to take a step back.
One of the things that I learned, when I was working in the hospice, was how visual images can help highly defended people like doctors or nurses, and even people who are seriously ill themselves, talk about their feelings. Looking at an image and describing the image, especially if the image has got something to do with illness or human frailty, can open up a conversation on sensitive and ‘difficult’ subjects in an oblique and powerful way, I discovered. It was fascinating to see how this worked.
I found myself getting more and more interested in visual images themselves. Before then I’d always considered myself a ‘words’ person, rather than visual. As a result, I did my master's degree in visual culture, went on and did a PhD and that eventually, in a roundabout way, led me to become a photographer.
So it's all a bit haphazard and I’m not sure if there is one experience or one decision that guided me. I’ve done various things, had setbacks and small personal ‘triumphs’ and overall I’ve definitely had the sense that I’ve been making it up as I go along. No question, however, that I feel I'm one of those really lucky people in that I’ve loved everything I've done.
What advice would you give yourself as your 20 year old knowing what you know now?
I would say ‘Don't People-Please’!
I’ve spent a lot of my early life pleasing people – or, should I say, trying to. That's partly because of the particular family I came from and partly it comes from being a woman in our culture. It was something that was really hard to unlearn. I was constantly trying to second guess what other people wanted from me, so it was a new beginning for me to try to learn what I want for myself.
So my advice is, ‘don't people-please’. It's not simple advice, for people like me at least. It's really hard to do.
You need to learn about who you are. I can remember being asked what I wanted at one stage in my life and literally being mystified. I just wanted to make the people around me happy and like me. It wasn't noble. It was a kind of insecurity. It could impact simple things as not being able to choose what I wanted to eat from a menu in a restaurant, to big, important life decisions.
Where to whom do you look for inspiration?
That's an interesting one because it's tempting to say ‘people who are older than I am’. But in fact, age doesn’t matter - it's about drawing inspiration from people who are leading an authentic life, living up to their ideals, whatever their age. These people, I’ve discovered, can certainly be older but equally, they can be a lot younger than me.
When you're feeling stuck or uninspired, how do you get yourself out of it?
I've had to think about this a lot during Covid because I’ve frequently felt stuck and uninspired. And my conclusion is, for me, it's about having access to other people and being able to talk to them about their life. Because when I'm stuck, the place I'm stuck in is my own headspace.
The great thing about talking to somebody else and getting under the skin of their life is that you get released from your own headspace. Focusing on someone else always gives you a bit of distance from your own stuff, I find. And of course, it’s always lovely to get close to another person and learn something about them.
In the last five years, what belief, behavior or habit has most improved your life?
Loosening up as I get older, I think, has been the big change for me. I'm less concerned about trying to control stuff and I'm caring less about outcomes. I like to think I’m staying more in the here and now, in the process of what’s happening to me at the moment.
I always used to try to control my own life. And relinquishing that, relinquishing the fantasy that we even have some control over our own life, has been very freeing for me.
I’ve also learned the value of enjoying what I'm doing. I was a child in the 50s and there was a tremendous culture then of fulfilling your duty, persevering with whatever task you found difficult, and doing the ‘right thing’. It was very earnest - a product of the post-war culture of the time. Enjoyment wasn’t part of the equation. So in a sense, I’ve had to learn that enjoying myself is not only allowed, it’s a healthy and helpful thing to do.
Now I’ve been learning that the happier I am, the happier I actually seem to make other people. I mean, who knew! Who knew that it's actually not selfish?! If you’re happy, you're better able to make friends and be of use to someone else.
You know the slogan, put your oxygen mask on first before assisting others? It’s a cliché but it really is so profoundly true. Isn’t it interesting how you can be a more helpful person to others if you look after your own needs first?
If you could put one quote or piece of advice on a big billboard for everyone over 50 to see what would it be?
I’m tempted to say something like, “If not now, then when?”
This is the kind of quote that we see so often on social media and they're fabulous quotes but we're getting so used to seeing them that it’s almost as though the meaning gets drained out of them, and in the end, I don't know how truly motivating they are. But it is a good one. Don’t wait for the perfect moment: just do it now!
What book or podcast would you recommend to somebody who's thinking about their 50+ life?
There's a site called The Age Buster that I love run by Stefania Medetti, a wonderful Italian woman living in Thailand. Stafania interviews people who are interested in the social, political, and economical implications of aging in the Western world, to help decode the stories we tell about aging.
I know about her because she got in touch and interviewed me, so forgive me for sounding perhaps self-promotional, but that’s not my point at all. I was incredibly taken by her and impressed by the people she has interviewed. I recommend her site wholeheartedly, and I would also recommend one particular interview, with a remarkable woman, now aged 93, called Dr. Leah Friedman.
I read Stefania’s interview with Leah before she and I talked together and I said to her, “this woman is just extraordinary, I’d love to know her; will you ask her if I can write to her?” She did, Leah said yes and the result is we have become really good virtual friends. I have really enjoyed getting to know her.
Leah has also written a book that I would recommend without hesitation. It’s called The Unexpected Adventure of Growing Old. I think it's one of the most inspiring books I’ve read about aging. Leah wrote it when she was in her late 80s and in it, she talks about what it's like being in your 60s, 70s and 80s. She has the most wonderful perspective.
Before we go, tell me what you’re working on now?
I’ve used this COVID time, when I haven't been able to take action photographs, to write a book of the life stories of the women that I’ve photographed in the past, namely female athletes aged over 60. So I spent the long lockdown period emailing and interviewing these athletes. I'm very excited about the book – which I now need to finish!
At the end of August, there's an athletics championship event so hopefully, I'll be photographing again then and seeing what sort of normality we have now over this coming autumn and winter.
I've also got a big new exhibition, outdoors, in Bristol next May called No Limits, that I have to work on over the winter. I’ve got plenty to do!
Just watch!
I highly recommend you take 6 minutes to watch Danielle Sellwood of Find it Film film about Alex’s work, entitled Older, A Portrait of a Photographer and Activist.
As Alex notes ‘it pretty much says what I’m trying to do, and why’. And it’s truly inspiring. Watch it below.
