The Long Lives We Carry at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center brings together the work of Gordon Baer and Jano Rečo in a compact but pointed exhibition about aging, care and the quiet realities of institutional life. On view from September 25 to October 23, 2026, the show is curated by Saad Ghosn, founder and president of SOS Art.
Baer, a Cincinnati-based photojournalist active for decades, focused much of his work on people often left outside the frame. His photographs of his Aunt Beck in her final days and his images from Ohio nursing homes are among the exhibition’s most affecting pieces. They register small gestures, private routines and the emotional weight of dependency without turning away from the harsher facts of neglect and vulnerability. His work has the plain force of lived experience, and that directness gives the series its authority.
Rečo’s Seniors Home, made in the early 1980s in Bohemia, approaches similar terrain from another angle. Created as part of a broader photographic cycle on social welfare institutions, the series draws on close contact with residents rather than distant observation. The photographs move between community and isolation, resilience and resignation, making institutional care visible as both a social system and a deeply personal condition. That balance keeps the work from feeling clinical, even when the setting is stark.
Placed together, the two bodies of work reveal strong parallels across time and geography. Both artists treat old age not as an abstract issue but as a human condition shaped by public systems and private bonds. Their photographs ask viewers to look closely at lives that are often hidden once they become dependent, frail or inconvenient to broader society. That makes the exhibition less a survey than a reminder of what photography can still do at its best: restore attention to people whose presence is easily overlooked.
The Long Lives We Carry is brief in duration, but its subject lingers. It presents aging not as an ending to be generalized, but as a life stage marked by dignity, exposure and care.
Image: Jano Rečo, Untitled, from The Seniors Home, 1996. Gelatin silver print, 9¼ × 6½ inches. Courtesy of the artist
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