Alex Rotas

I live in Bristol, a UK city I love, having arrived via London, the city of my birth and childhood, Cambridge, Athens and Somerset. My father was Greek and my mother still is British, so I have dual nationality. In my younger days I played tennis for Greece (with more pleasure than success, I should add).

I studied at Cambridge University, the University of Western Michigan and Bath Spa University and have degrees in geography, special education and visual culture. I've taught school kids geography, pre-school deaf children language skills, university students visual theory and spent a challengingly enjoyable few years developing palliative care training programmes in a hospice. My doctoral thesis was on the work of visual artists who have arrived in Europe as refugees and asylum seekers. It reads bizarrely but as a lived life it felt seamless, with one thing just leading on to the next.

My academic interest in sports studies began about 5 years ago when I was surprised one day by what I was seeing as a tennis fan trawling through the websites of elite women players. (For what I saw and for other academic links, including my PhD, go to my academic website www.alexrotas.org.uk currently also under reconstruction, rather like its owner, so please bear with me). I started turning my attention to older competitive sportsmen and women, partly because I was becoming one myself. From looking at visual images, critiquing them and bemoaning the absence of positive pictures of older people focused and actively absorbed in their lives, I found myself thinking that these were the kinds of pictures I'd like to try to take and make myself.

Four years ago I was lucky enough to find the best photography teacher in Bristol - Rachel Sokal who took me from a standing start to where I'm at now. I've been learning not only about photography, but also about what were the new-to-me sports that I've been shooting. I'm not sure I can call myself an old pro yet but the faces on the masters athletics circuit are becoming familiar to me now, as mine is perhaps becoming to them. I'm learning about the lives of these extraordinary men and women I photograph who continue to compete in their seventh, eight, ninth and tenth decades. Some are becoming friends. Like them, I am starting to arrange my life around the next big championship meet. My photography bag gets heavier and heavier as I acquire new kit. I am totally hooked - both on photography and on masters athletics. Loving it.

I play tennis for Avon Vets and am an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. I'm grateful to my practice as a follower of Zen Buddhism. I have three grown-up children and three grandchildren who live in Greece plus two more grandchildren from my very special 'adoptive' family on the Isle of Wight.

Photographer's Statement

My most recent project photographing veteran sports men and women stems both from my love of sport and from my academic interest in the kinds of images that are associated with ageing. It is also fiercely motivated by a desire to challenge some of the assumptions associated with the social construct of ageing, assumptions that link getting older with decline, passivity, increasing helplessness and physical and mental deterioration. Older athletes transgress these commonly held attitudes: they are determined, by definition very physical and active, focused, enthusiastic, joyful, and full of life. Older women athletes are even more transgressive in their competitiveness, physicality, strength, speed and toughness: attributes all associated not only with youth but also with a masculine ideal.

Although you become a 'veteran' in the sports world at the tender age of 35, my real interest lies in photographing athletes in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. These people demonstrate that 'lifeyness' (if I can call it that) and vigour do not necessarily decline with age. They show too that it's possible to look wonderful without pretending to be younger than you are. Competitive veteran sportsmen and women have all the lines and wrinkles that come with their age but they look amazing as they push themselves physically and mentally to achieve new goals. There are always new records to break in every age group as you get older so these athletes are constantly working to better their techniques and to maintain, if not improve, their performance.

We're all used to seeing photos of athletes but not perhaps these sorts of athletes. And while not everyone can be - or even wants to be - an athlete, I hope that my images remind us all of what's possible as we age and force us to think again about our attitudes towards ageing.