The Long Lives We Carry

Presented as part of the FotoFocus Biennial 2026, and curated by Saad Ghosn of SOS Art, The Long Lives We Carry brings together photographs by Cincinnati photojournalist Gordon Baer and Czech and Slovak photographer Jano Rečo in a moving meditation on aging, caregiving, and dignity at the end of life.  Through deeply compassionate images of nursing homes, institutional life, and intimate moments of vulnerability, the exhibition asks viewers to consider aging not as an abstract social issue, but as a shared and inevitable human experience.

Gordon Baer (1940–2019) , a lifelong Cincinnati-based photographer, is known for his sensitive documentation of the overlooked and the vulnerable. His deeply personal series on his dying aunt Beck, as well as his photographs of nursing homes in Ohio, reveal a commitment to bearing witness to lives often forgotten by society. His images honor the intimacy of decline, capturing fleeting gestures of tenderness alongside the stark realities of institutional neglect.

Jano Rečo (b. 1948), trained in film and photography at Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts, produced Seniors Home in the early 1980s as part of a larger cycle on social welfare institutions in Bohemia. Commissioned by the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, these images transcend their initial function, offering not bureaucratic record but a profoundly human testimony. Through close personal contact with residents, Rečo illuminated the contradictions of aging in confinement—community and loneliness, resilience and resignation, routine and waiting.

Together, Baer and Rečo reveal convergences across national and political contexts in how societies see, support, and sequester the elderly. Their work does not moralize but instead confronts viewers with the unvarnished presence of those nearing life’s end. By bringing their images into dialogue, The Long Lives We Carry underscores the persistence of aging as a universal human condition—one shaped by systems of care, yet irreducibly intimate.

Saad Ghosn, a native of Lebanon, has been living in the US since 1976. A Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati, Saad resorts to visual and spoken art to express himself and convey his social and political views. He is the Founder and President of ‘SOS (Save Our Souls) ART’ (sosartcincinnati.com), a Cincinnati-based non-profit organization, now in its 24th year, whose mission is to encourage, promote and provide opportunities and venues for all the arts as vehicles for peace and justice. For the past few years Saad has mostly used printmaking in his own art that serves as a vehicle for his social and political views and beliefs, and as a tool for a better world. In addition to his own work, he has been curating art shows locally, nationally, and internationally for the past forty years. His focus is on empowering artists and on promoting their use of art as a vehicle for a change.