This New Photo Collection Shows Older Disabled People Through the Right Lens

The Centre for Ageing Better is a UK-based charity working to create a society in which everyone can live a good later life — and where being older isn't seen as a negative.

Better visual representation is crucial for depicting older age in a positive light, so Centre for Ageing Better have teamed up with Pexels to bring their free photo collection to the Pexels library.

Their latest contributions, made in collaboration with Get Yourself Active, a program run by Disability Rights UK, focus on portraying older Disabled people: a group that's far too often excluded from stock photography. Here, they're sharing why that matters and how we can work to change it.

The saying goes that a picture paints a thousand words. Nowhere is this truer than when Disabled and older people look to the media.

Through our new Picture Yourself Active project, Get Yourself Active and the Centre for Ageing Better want to change society's stories about getting active and enjoying physical activity as a Disabled or older person.

Our new, publicly accessible image library of over 300 photos (some of which are also available on Pexels) depicting older and Disabled people getting active will hopefully help to challenge pervasive negative stereotypes.

Longstanding barriers

At Get Yourself Active, we know that public confusion on the realities of life as a Disabled person are major barriers to participation in something as important as physical activity.

The research tells how serious an issue this is. Almost two-thirds of people have admitted to avoiding Disabled people because they didn't know how to act around them.

Research carried out by the Centre for Ageing Better shows that attitudes towards getting older are similarly negative. Less than half (46%) of adults express a positive view of ageing, and two in five of 18-34 year olds see older age as characterised by frailty, vulnerability and dependency.

If you never see the reality of ageing and disability, how would you know how to behave?

This confusion often leads to people holding back from taking part. Many worry that they will lose access to benefits if they are seen being "too active." They feel that they might be at risk if they don't conform to the image society has in mind of the life older and Disabled people should have. At this challenging time, we want to make sure that Disabled and older people no longer decide not to get out and have fun for fear of being misunderstood.

The truth behind the photo

We want to help to change this narrative through the Picture Yourself Active project. Too often, the images and media used to show us getting active hide the truth.

Our message is clear: you don't have to be a Paralympian to be praised.

Every one of us will be able to remember seeing photos of hands on shoulders or wrinkly hands to denote ageing or disability. And if you do actually find an image of a Disabled person on a website or in a news article you will find the focus is just on people whose impairments are visible.

This lack of representative images only gets worse as we age. The images used to denote older people too often combine ageism with disablism to suggest that our right to enjoy being active is an afterthought.

Working together for change

We think that the Picture Yourself Active campaign is a really strong starting point. Together with the Centre for Ageing Better, we are taking big steps to address the imbalance of imagery. Picture Yourself Active is a collection of free-to-use photographs of older Disabled people getting active.

Our photos capture the truth of getting active. We want everyone involved to feel empowered and happy about seeing the reality of their lives captured through our work. We made sure that was honest about our community. We worked with Disabled people to design the brief and create a list of dos and don'ts for photographers, or anyone looking to capture images of Disabled or older people, to follow so they can be confident that their work is an honest reflection.

By making the images free and publicly available through the age-positive image library and Pexels, we hope that everyone will be able to take the chance to represent us accurately. This new library challenges stereotypes and communicates a more diverse representation of what it means to be older and Disabled.

We have seen many positive changes happen in and around us over the last few years. More and more people across society are looking to center the lived experience of Disabled and older people in their work. We want our project to push this forward.

We hope that our image library will mean that the lives of older Disabled people are no longer reduced to lazy stereotypes.

Written by Mikey Erhardt, Get Yourself Active Communications Officer