Troy Duster (Photo by Nancy Rubin)
What’s the upside of being old? Martin Snapp asks that question in California Magazine .
“I can only quote what George Burns answered when someone asked him what was the best thing about being 95,” Troy Duster, a comparative youngster at only 80 tells him: ” ‘No peer pressure.’” Duster, UC Berkeley emeritus professor in sociology and former president of the American Sociological Association, is one of a dozen seniors being profiled in a new photographic exhibition at UC Berkeley’s Doe Library titled “Reframing Aging,” which, true to its name, mirrors changing attitudes about growing old.
“I’m so thrilled it will be at Doe,” said the photographer, Nancy Rubin, who graduated from Berkeley in 1967. “I thought it would be in some small library, but to find out it was going to be where I used to study…The exhibit is right across from the Morrison room.”
Like many of her subjects, the 71-year-old Rubin, a former teacher at Berkeley High, has reinvented herself as a photographer in retirement. A recent photography project at Ashby Village, a virtual community with more than 400 members that helps seniors lead independent lives in their own homes for as long as possible, sparked her newest photos.
“The exhibit grew out of that,” she said. “Talking with these people kept changing my view of aging. They were so vital, so involved with their communities and, for some, with their art.”