Leonard Nones: Portraits of Resilience features photographer Leonard Nones’s twenty-four archival inkjet portraits of residents of RiverWalk and Hebrew Home at Riverdale on RiverSpring Living’s Riverdale campus. An unintended and happy consequence of Leonard Nones’s move four years ago to RiverWalk, the independent living apartment building on the Hebrew Home campus, is that he was able to get back to work. After completing Essential Workers, his portraits of staff, last year, Nones turned to his neighbors for another series. Once again, he set up his studio in the RiverWalk dining room and invited people to sit for him. More than twenty residents of RiverWalk and Hebrew Home at Riverdale volunteered. The results are Portraits of Resilience—photographs that show that while getting older has its challenges, this chapter of life is also a time of opportunity and growth, of wisdom and reflection, a time to make new friends, and to continue doing what you love. 

For Nones, the project was another occasion to be engaged and the responses of the people he photographed were especially gratifying. When asked what he was trying to show, Nones replied: “Simply that getting older isn’t so bad. Older people are intelligent, bright, interested, everything they always were and more.”

A lifetime as a professional photographer has given Nones the expertise to draw out the vibrant expressions and animated spirits of his subjects. The portraits reveal full and rich lives, individuals whose vitality and personalities come across, coaxed by Nones’s gentle directions to each one: “tilt your head,” “put your hands together,” “look just a little more to the right.”