Visual diaries, creativity and everyday life

Visual images are omnipresent within our daily lives. Visual culture has gained prominence in the twenty-first century due to technological and digital developments, the prominence of consumer culture and an increase in and proliferation of contemporary media. In this context, the visual increasingly permeates significant aspects of our everyday lives, social identities, lifestyles, communications and societies (Pink 2001); it has therefore become ever more present within people’s social worlds as they grow older. The importance of the visual is further associated with the emergence of cultural gerontology (Twigg and Martin 2015a, 2015b). Whilst the Cultural Turn may have come quite late to ageing studies – due to a prior focus on medicine, social welfare and policy issues – in the last decade cultural perspectives have increasingly influenced the field, with new theorising, new methodologies and new subject areas evident (Twigg and Martin 2015a, 2015b).