Nightingale

Meera Margaret Singh’s series Nightingale focuses on her mother as the protagonist in a narrative about human fragility and tenacity, symbolically embodying both life and death. Singh explores aging and loss, inviting us to look closely at the beauty and sadness of these realities from which we so often—willfully and collectively—avert our eyes. In contrast to mass media’s equation of physical allure with youth, Singh unapologetically focuses on, and in fact celebrates, the bodily evidence of aging. Singh uses portraiture as a form of social engagement to examine and question the world around her.