When I called Ari Seth Cohen for our phone interview, he was at a friend’s house. This friend wasn’t a similarly-aged companion, but instead a 68-year-old woman named Debra who lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I asked if I should call back another time, but Cohen said it was alright, that most of his older female friends don’t mind when he does some press at their homes—after all, what better place to discuss Advanced Style, his street style photography blog, than from the home of one of its subjects.

Although Cohen, 31, was always interested in art and fashion, the inspiration to start photographing older women came from his grandmother, who he calls his best friend. After her death, he decided to pick up a camera as a way to connect with fashionable older people he encountered across New York City. Although Cohen’s photography started as an odd attraction, his dedication to displaying the enthusiasm and vitality of his subjects is incredibly heartfelt. His subject pool includes men and women above 50, but women tend to get the focus thanks to their flair for fashion and makeup.

He has a book out and is producing a documentary about his experience, both called Advanced Style. “Don’t worry about getting older,” one woman explains in the trailer for the film, “every era builds character.”

Did your interest in photography come before your interest in older women or vice versa?

I was always into art; I studied art history in college, but I only started taking pictures five years ago when I moved to New York City. I started with my roommate’s Nikon Coolpix, and then I taught myself how to take better pictures and developed my skill. But photography was just a way for me to connect with older people. I wasn’t planning on being a photographer, it just happened because of the project I was working on.

So there was never a thought to photograph another type of subject?

No. Only older people.

Why?

Well, I grew up in San Diego and my grandmothers were my best friends. I always had a very positive idea of what it’s like to get older because of how fun and interesting they were. One of my grandmothers went to graduate school at Columbia University and she would tell me as a little kid to move to New York if I wanted to be creative.

I finally moved here in 2008 and I approached the city through my grandmother’s eyes. I wanted to meet older people because she had passed away, and then I began meeting all of these incredibly interesting, active old people. At first I wanted to interview them for my own project, which I wasn’t planning on sharing with people. Then I decided I had good material and I started my blog.

What’s a day in the life of Ari Seth Cohen like?

Well, today I woke up and posted on my blog. Then I met up with my friend Debra Rapoport on the Upper East Side, she’s putting together a website for all the hats she makes. After this I plan to walk around the city—I walk everywhere—taking pictures of older men and older women, and hopefully I’ll be able to make connections to interview them and share their stories with other people.

Do the older ladies cook for you, grandma style? Have you recruited recipes?

I do want to work on a blog post of recipes but I haven’t yet. Debra always cooks, and she’s a good cook, but it’s not really a grandmother/grandson relationship between these ladies and me. They are more like my friends. We walk around and go to galleries and museums.

Tomorrow I’m traveling with this 80-year-old woman to a conference in Michigan on elder abuse. We’re going to speak there about the work we do together, which is hopefully changing people’s ideas of what it means to grow old.

What’s the biggest misunderstanding about old people?

I think that people neglect, forget, or ignore older people and don’t realize their worth. They don’t realize that they still want to be heard and that they still have a lot to offer. Oftentimes you look at someone who’s older and you may think they don’t have the same understanding of the world, but all the people I meet are so aware and present.

On your website it says you’re working on an Advanced Style documentary due out this year. What’s the focus of the film?

There are six ladies that my friend and I have been following for the last five years since I first met them on the street. A lot of them have found new careers in modeling and acting all from being exposed on the blog, so it follows their story and the story of the blog.

Where’s the best place to find interesting older people?

Oh definitely uptown, that’s where I spend most of my time.

What’s your favorite part about your job?

First of all, it’s being able to spend time with such incredible people. But over the course of the past two years I’ve also come out with my book and I’ve been invited all over the world to speak and meet more interesting older people in different communities. It’s been incredible to hear their stories, travel, and be able to document it and share it with the world. It’s amazing when an older person emails me after seeing the blog and tells me how it has impacted their life and how they feel about themselves. Or even a younger person saying they feel less afraid of getting older.

How have younger people—and your friends—reacted to your interest in older people?

My friends totally get that this is the perfect thing for me to be doing; I’ve always spoken so much about my grandmother. I haven’t found much disapproval. When I go on dates people are a little surprised, but it is a quirky interest.

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After Yom Kippur ended this year, my family began to prepare for Sukkot. We took the sukkah out, set up the frame, and then carefully put on the top and covered it with leaves. We then hung up construction paper fruit and two bunches of plastic grapes. Between two of the poles, my mother tied a piece of string, and then, one by one, hung up Rosh Hashanah cards.

Together, we then set up the tables and chairs, placed a plant near a rear pole and a basket of apples near another. Finally, just before sukkot started, we set the table with a tray of black and white cookies, a plate of cupcakes, two bowls of fruit, and bottles of seltzer and wine. All of this was on the same table.

The sukkah we so meticulously set up and decorated is my grandmother’s tabletop sukkah, which my family curates each year. I say curate because it will always be my grandmother’s sukkah, and anything we place in it was not in the original design, but honors her artistic vision.

When my grandmother, an artist and rabbi’s wife, came up with the idea for the sukkah, she had a florist create the frame. The frame consists of four green wooden rods that serve as poles and a green wooden rectangle, which sits on top of the four poles. In the center of the rectangle is mesh wiring. The sukkah’s design reflects that of a traditional sukkah, only on a much smaller scale.

I never celebrated Sukkot with my grandmother so I never had the chance to see how she set up and decorated her sukkah. My Aunt tells me that it sat prominently on the table and that my grandmother adorned it with evergreens and hung miniature squash from the wire. Since my grandparents lived in an apartment in Chicago, it was this small sukkah that was the Cohen family sukkah.

A few years before she passed away, my grandmother gave us the sukkah. Sitting proudly on our dining room table, the Cohen sukkah was decorated to match our backyard sukkah. Construction paper apples, oranges, and bananas were hung with string from the wire, just as plastic fruit hung from the top of our sukkah. We turned to my dollhouse for a table that would mirror the patio table from our backyard, and then sat the family that lived in the dollhouse around the table.

This lasted for several years, until the dollhouse contents and residents were misplaced when my mother moved into an apartment in Manhattan. Last year, a sukkah remodeling was needed, and we took the task very seriously. My mom went to a dollhouse store and purchased the equivalent of a backyard bench and chairs, a small table with plates and cups, and a mini basket of apples. We still had the construction paper fruit, and bunches of plastic grapes that had once hung in our backyard sukkah.

But then last week, as we started setting up the tabletop sukkah, we realized that the new furniture was not enough. The structure felt incomplete. To make it into my grandmother’s sukkah again, we had to do more. More dollhouse items—a floor plant, a full table set, and food and beverages—made it feel warm, but we needed more of a sense of family tradition. We settled upon our longtime suburban ritual of hanging Rosh Hashanah cards from the top of our backyard sukkah.

My mom took a card we had recently received from a family friend, and from it made a dozen mini cards. Then, we made the first major change to the sukkah frame since it sat in my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago. We added cloth walls, a significant addition to the structure and a pretty emotional renovation.

All together the furniture, construction paper and plastic fruit, food, cards, and cloth walls make this year’s sukkah one that we would very much like to sit in, were it full size. More important, it’s a structure that honors my grandmother. How the sukkah is decorated may have changed, but its meaning remains the same—it’s the Cohen family sukkah, and we’re very proud of it.

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Every conversation I ever had with Ben Zion Wacholder, my Zayde (grandfather), turned to that same question. When I was in Yeshiva high school, I would start telling Zayde about a Talmud passage I’d learned recently and he would recite the next five lines by heart. In college, I’d mention Homer and he would nod in approval. After I graduated and took a part-time personal assistant job, answering Zayde’s well-intentioned interrogations became a painful part of returning home, a reminder that my brain was melting away answering phones and booking travel arrangements. Stuttering through an answer, visiting Zayde became a constant reminder that I was learning … nothing.

A little background. Famously, while living in hiding as a non-Jew on a Polish farm during World War II, my Zayde used to teach Talmud to the cows. Even alone in the fields, talking about Judaism put his life in danger, but life without learning was impossible for him. Decades later, when he was a Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, my Zayde and his student Marty Abegg published the first partial translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which previously had been kept secret by a small group of scholars, earning himself more than a few enemies in the world of early Christian and Rabbinic scholarship. Again, he believed that knowledge is meant to be used, and he couldn’t stand to see it hidden away.

In March of 2011, Zayde passed away and I traveled to Israel with my mother and her siblings for his funeral. We were in Israel for five days, and the whole trip is a blur of emotions, jet lag, confusing ritual dancing at the cemetery, and small talk with strangers at shiva. But what I do remember is the stories my Zayde’s former students, colleagues, and friends told me about him, and the letters they started sending my family.

The stories were so rich and varied that I decided I wanted to compile them and piece together a complete picture of my Zayde. While I was struggling to decide whether I was capable of putting together anything that somebody would publish, my mother—who was using Google while the rest of us were still Asking Jeeves—put my 21st-century self to shame by pointing out that the best way to share information with lots of people is online. So I went back to school, and signed myself up for courses in Web programming and design.

It turned out that after drowning in the liberal arts for years, my brain was starving for a little quantitative reason and binary logic. After four years of college and then two years working in the art world, I was bored to death with spurious interpretations and pretentious nonsense masquerading as theory. Growing up in a family of academics, I felt like a failure when I realized that academia frustrated me, that my brain is too concrete and results-oriented for the ambiguities and abstractions of studying the humanities. But Web programming was empowering. Work with a clear purpose and a defined end point! Actual right and wrong answers! Visible results! I finally found a field that feels relevant and current, and a place I could contribute more than yet another paper or article.

It also turns out that programming was kind of hard. For a year and a half, instead of building an online archive about my Zayde, I’ve been busy building HTML tables and struggling through PHP control structures. But, as I slogged through the busywork, I was relieved that I finally had an answer to Zayde’s eternal question, “So, what are you learning?”

And so, a year and six programming languages later, I finally created BenZionWacholder.org. It is a tribute to my Zayde not just because it contains his writing and writing about him, but because through preparing this project I rediscovered my love of learning. The site is a work in progress—I’m still gathering knowledge about my Zayde and the programming skills I need. And that’s exactly as it should be. As long as I’m still learning, I know that I’m remembering him the right way.

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