‘The Leave-Taking’ by Ruth Steinberg

Photo-based artist Ruth Steinberg engages in visual storytelling that aims to capture the dignity and resilience of marginalized communities, particularly the elderly. She had been taking pictures of her neighbour and friend, Alma Norman, for years when the latter decided to have a medically assisted death. The photographs from the 5 months leading up to Alma's death in November 2020 were made public in The Leave-Taking, an exhibit in the Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa’s City Hall in 2023. Staging the photographs on movable walls and in separate rooms recreated the atmosphere of Alma’s apartment for visitors. Unsettling and intimate – the images depict Alma in disposable underwear, crumbs left on a counter – the exhibit offers details about Alma’s life in her final days. The focus on the materiality of old age – papers, photographs, dishes, fabrics – as well as the domestic – an unfinished delivery meal, a rudimentary stair climbing chair – reinforce the universalizability of Alma’s experience. The photographs are also about time: how we spend a day knowing that one day (soon) we shall die, how seasons pass (the photos depict both summer and autumn), and the time that slips by as one contemplates art (an accompanying video begins and ends with the sound of a metronome). The exhibition catalogue remarks that the photographs simply take ‘the time to be with someone as they go through the process, right to the end.’

Alma Norman was a long-time social justice advocate, and her work was featured in several cultural productions – including the 2014 Canadian documentary film Granny Power! – as an example of older women’s political activism. Alma reflects in a video accompanying the photographs that social justice has been her inspiration for most of her life and once she loses the ability to act, the idea of sitting around – being alive, as opposed to living – is not appealing. She expresses this plainly, saying ‘my idea of being alive is that I’m doing something.’ Alma’s activist past is reflected in the photographs via buttons and posters for various causes, her ‘When I am an Old Woman, I shall wear purple’ T-shirt, and her membership of Raging Grannies. Here, her individual choice to access MAID is framed as an answer to being incapable of performing social justice duties. Alma highlights in the video that, for her, quality of life is a necessary criterion for living, and she wants the criteria for MAID to take this into account. Alma explains her decision to use MAID and to render this process public through photographs as part of a desire to educate people that MAID is a viable option. Commenting on the series, Ruth Steinberg reflects that in her final months, Alma lived exactly as she wanted to and she died in the same way, looking forward to her death as the beginning of a new journey. Alma's civic engagement, her heightened sense of agency as an elderly woman, as well as her artistic sensibilities all contributed to her collaboration with her friend in this photo series. The Leave-Taking, therefore, is both an attempt to capture the granularity of old age and waiting for death, as well as a specific and positive take on MAID. These sensibilities also resonate within other contributions based in Canada -- see Jason Warick's portrait of Jeanette Lodoen in this Archive -- a country were assisted dying is widely accepted but never trivial, and historically associated with the stories of women.