¡Colores!; 116; Ann Noggle: Capturing the Character of Aging, Basilia Sanchez

You You You The photographer Ann Noggle explores the art and beauty of growing older.

I want to show that we have sensuality and sexuality as older people. I guess I want to shock younger people too. I want to shock them into saying, hey, look at me. Here I am. You know, I'm not out to pasture. I'm alive and well living in Albuquerque. And a profile of artist Basilia Sanchez. I start painting what I was about 12. I paint constantly. I like to create. Coming up next on Colores. Colores.

Colores. Colores. I was born in Evans, San Illinois. And I don't mind telling when, 1922, so if you can count, you'd know I'm 67. And when I was a little girl, I was very interested in airplanes. Because I saw a millionaire heart. I'm a very impulsive person anyway. And I guess I was even then. Because immediately I knew I wanted to be a pilot. I learned to fly when I was in high school. I think I was a senior. I was 17. I can remember being at my grandmother's house. And I had the form that my mother had to sign so I could solo because I wasn't of age.

And she's signing the form and my grandmother said to her, you just signed her death certificate. And then World War II came along. And they sent us all letters. And we had a couple of us who knew how to fly. Although I was very young in it. And ask us if we wanted to become women air force service pilots or what they called wasp then. So I went down and immediately signed up. And I had to wait then until I was 21. I was assigned to a base where I towed targets for aerial gunnery. I was disability retired from the air force. I was 37 or 38. It's cloudy.

And I decided to go to college on the GI Bill. So it was fortunate for me that about that time Van Derren Coke came to the University of New Mexico and started the program in photography. So my advisor said, take a course in photography so you can make nice slides of work when you become an art historian. And I thought, oh well, okay, I'll take photography. And when the first print came up in the tray, I looked at it and everything fell into place. And I knew I'd be a photographer forever, however long that might be. Okay, lean in. God, these things are uncomfortable. Okay. I hope you were looking like a football player. No, I was smiling. I was trying to keep from laughing.

No, it's no wonder they get so tough out there. They're just mad. They have to have this thing on. When people ask me, what are you going to do next? I'd say the same thing I'm doing now. There's a photograph of people with the main emphasis on older people and not just because I'm older myself. That started quite a long time ago. The photographing older people. I found that this thing we call character was growing on people. And I found that I wasn't interested in wrinkles, never have been. I wanted the character of that person. And there's a beauty that comes with a sort of acceptance of life and an understanding what it's about. So when I discovered that, I had another life's work, which flying was for me earlier on. Music Music

Music As time went by, an intermingled with these other photographs started up what ended up being a series of images of myself. Probably the most notorious of those was when I had a face lift. And I made a record of it. I didn't want to make a record of something that was horrible because to me, it was really wonderful. I'd had two lung surgeries, one one year, one the next. And it really pulled me down. It made me look 15 years older than I was. And I thought it was unfair. And I had a friend who had a face lift. So I thought, that's for me.

And I remember when they were wheeling me down to start the face lift, I'm lying there just smiling thinking, this is one surgery I love. I'm going to really enjoy having. And when I went home, I really looked like hell. And my face was all swollen in that. I looked in the mirror. And I winked at myself because I just knew that it was going to be marvelous. Probably most of the reason that I make a number of these self images is because I really want to show the viability of older people. And these later images are more about myself than they were earlier on. And I want to show that we have sensuality and sexuality as older people.

I guess I want to shock younger people too. I want to shock them into saying, hey, look at me. Here I am. You know, I'm not out to pasture. I'm alive and well and living in Albuquerque. And so when I was on the west coast, I was in the Pacific Northwest. I went out into the rainforest there and made an image, which this is called the Old Nymph. And it wasn't much fun making it in the sense that it was cold and nasty there. But it was wonderful to have the image. Another set of images that show the same sort of a bent is a group that I call stellar by starlight. And I made them out in my jacuzzi. And I brought a fogger that, like they use in the movies, although a little team, I love it. And I did this series, one, two, and three,

called stellar by starlight. And in this one, I'm a rising sort of. But you notice that I'm wearing my glasses. And that's the clue that these are not just fun, but they're also seriously about the way human beings look at older people, young people look at older people. And I think if there's any group of people who have been set aside by society, it's older people. I want to kick this up so that people re-evaluate what they're saying and thinking about us, older folks. When we're young, we all remember all the songs from our young years. And until the day we die, sing all the melodies. I remember this song called Stellar by Starlight. And I thought, what a great title it would be. I changed it to Stellar by Starlight. And I used these images.

Oh, great, symphonic theme. That stellar by starlight. And not a dream. But my heart, and I agree, she's everything on earth to me. I could write a sonnet. We have a good film in there too.

It's an ASA 100. I've got three video cameras, and I'm crazy about video, not to make movie, but to use that frame and really find new kinds of imagery in it. That brings that light in there. I think you can come a little bit more. This is called one of us from a series of recent follies. And the way it was made was by turning the video camera on myself and then putting my still camera in front of the monitor and taking the picture off the monitor in the whole time I could see how I was looking and arranged myself. And I had a ball-belong cord with a ball on it. So I could take these photographs off of the video. And the reason I like video imagery is that the light has an electronic quality to it.

I guess where we are? That's Turkey, Istanbul. I wish I were there. This is the Istanbul station. Train station. This is on the Istanbul Express, and we did a lot of video on the train. This is one of the images I made on the Istanbul Express. It's of me as the sleeping beauty, more or less. At any rate, it's one of them that I like a lot. That I took off the screen, the video screen. I'm thinking about whether I want it this way or whether I want to reshoot it in black and white. I do like the image. I like the way I look and it makes me feel good to remember that this was on the Istanbul Express. This is my studio.

It's also a pool room and playroom, but these pictures are up here for a couple of reasons. One is I love the people that are on these walls. And I like to live with them. And even in the evening, if I turn on the radio, I like jazz and I turn on some jazz and play some pool. It's wonderful because I feel like I'm here with all of my friends and the people that I've loved. For example, I went up to photograph my sister, Mary. And Mary had said to me, it's your birthday. What do you want for your birthday? And I said, I want to photograph you. So she gave me an afternoon.

And when we get started, we just have a good time. So what happened first is I had this image of Mary as a movie star. And so I asked her, she'd do this. And I'm way more romantic than she is, but she giggled and did it for me as a movie star. Because she has that kind of face. It's wonderful. Early on, I also began to note that because I was working a lot within the confines of our home, or my sister's home, or my mother lived, that what I really became involved in was the little things that go on in people's lives. And the day that I walked in and my mother in the bathroom, we sort of kept track of her later on. But anyway, she had her dentures in her hand. And this image I call artifact. And it's really about the beauty of almost all these small gestures that are part of our lives. I have one other photograph of Agnes, my mother, that I like very much, and it's about her and the way she was.

But it's also about something else that's so photographic, and that's the texture of it. That's this image. It's called Agnes in her fur collar. And she was sitting, waiting to be taken to the doctor. And my mother turned inward as she got older, and she would ruminate inside her head. And we used to say to her, my sister particularly would say to her, are you in there? And of course she laughed, and she was very much in this world. And she had great humor until the day she died. All of these images are about aging. They're about being a movie star at that age. They're about how beautiful you are, and how much there is in the face that has to do with this wonderful character. Rather than a pretty face that yet is unformed and unrealized because you know life playing on it is where the beauty lies.

Probably the primary thing that people think about photographs, you can feel that appeal in them. It's like, remember me. Well, in 1986, all of the WASP women air force service pilots, that is, don't mistake that one, were between the ages of 60 and 80 years old. Those of us who flew in World War II. I decided when we had our reunion in Sweetwater, Texas that year, where we gone through training that I had to photograph the women then or not at all. I have a few examples of what I got. This is a very large image of one of the gals.

I told her to look right into the camera, and that's what she did. I chose 48 of them, and they're going to be in a book called, along with some snapshots in World War II, in a book called, For God Country and the thrill of it. I want this book to bring at least a few people to the realization that when you see a woman, here I am, as a woman air force service pilot, when you see a woman, an old woman walking down the street, instead of thinking that old lady or thinking nothing, just discounting them because they're a woman, I want people to think, wow, I wonder if she flew airplanes, if she was a fighter, flew fighters in World War II. One night when I was in the dark room, I had this rush of words, and this poem came out whole almost exactly as it is, and it's titled, Sketch for a Self-Portrait, and it goes like this.

Where are you tonight? Well, this guy reflects my solitary presence. Where are you now, those of you who might whisper, I love you? Are you in a watery grave down under the sea with a picture of me smiling in your hip pocket? Where did all the promise go? Where did all the friends go? Have we dissolved into the past? Are we granny or auntie or that old lady down the street? I have lost my way, and my face reminds me of that. Every stop and start, love and loss, legible. A whole individual story, and who will read it? Who will look into my face and find me there? I started painting when I was about 12. I paint constantly all the time. In 1928, I went to a competition for a scholarship. I got one of the scholarship that was five in my province, because he was divided by the province.

When I got the scholarship, I came to Havana, the capital, to go to the art school there, which in San Alejandro are schools. There's something like San Fernando Madrid in Madrid. It's very strict. I studied there six years, and I came out of there with the call here, master the group, and then I did a whole lot of portraits. I make quite a good money with them too. I'm interested in the portrait more than anything else, because I love to paint people. There are lots of people who do what I was doing for many years.

Now, when I graduated from the University of San Alejandro School of Art, I went and competed again for a scholarship to travel abroad. I was going to go to Spain, but I didn't make it because the pain was a revolution. In 1938, I came to the United States to New York, and I got married and started a new home. The paintings that I've done in New York, they're different, really. Not different. They are softer. In New York, I used to go to the center park and do paintings.

I saw this tree there by itself, so I got so impressed that I went back and I did the painting. Solidario. In 1959, we moved to Staten Island, New York, and I started painting again really a lot. We lived near the beach, and I went there, and I very loved the very old boat that was stuck in the bottom. When I went again, the boat wasn't there, and I found out by the man that he used to be a fish man, and he said to me, well, they took it away, and it was only pieces that came apart because it was so many years talking about it. And I said, what do they have to take it now that I'm painting it? So I was able to finish off that painting without the boat.

Since I moved to New Mexico, I haven't changed very much. I do change the lighting. My pictures are bright now because the life here is very, very strong and pure. My painting from Cuba looks more like the paintings from over here, because the song there is very strong, everything is very dry and it's hot. My philosophy of life, really, I love to enjoy myself. I like to create. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it.

I love it.