Fran Sherman
My 70th Year
In My 70th year, I feel unmoored as I navigate life in retirement, without the urgency of
family and work that was my reality for so many years. The open space is both unsettling
and exciting.
In the chaos of raising a family and building a career, I found structure and purpose. Life
was busy but also felt full and limitless. Now I have more time than ever each day, but I
have fewer years ahead of me. Life is full of contradictions—I am grateful for all I have yet
eager for more; energetic yet tired; creative yet stuck. Time is expansive and compressed,
moving slowly and quickly at once.
Conversations with my peers confirm that they too are figuring out who they are and how to
make the most of time as they age. We haven’t changed, but less is demanded of us at a
time when we have so much to give.
My 70th Year is an ongoing photographic journal. Using a documentary photography
approach, I make pictures of my daily life to better understand how I am feeling and where I
am going. Still lives reflect parts of me, and long exposures, focus, collage, and images in
series, show the way my life feels embedded in and experienced through the lens of time.
Artist Bio
Through environmental portraits and documentary photography, Fran Sherman explores the lives of women and girls and the meaning of family and community. Her work as a photographer exists alongside her forty-five-year career as an attorney for children, clinical law professor at Boston College Law School, and policy consultant on issues related to gender, children’s rights and the youth legal system.
Individual narrative is central to Fran’s law and policy work—and narrative, both explicit and suggested, guides her photography as well. In her photographic practice, Fran co-creates narratives with the subjects of her photography.
Fran is co-founder of two youth art and activism non-profits—Artistic Noise and I Am Why— which work to expand young activists’ power and policy reach through artistic expression. Her collaborative photographic portraits and the conversations they inspired are published in an art and social justice book, I Am Why Reclaiming the Lens. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Boston, Cambridge, San Francisco and Vermont and has been featured in non-profit publications.