Particularly memorable was a portrait he took of Morrie and Betty Markoff, who were married 80 years before Betty passed away in September at the age of 103.

Betty, who moved from Toronto to Queens, New York with her family when she was 10, met Morrie, a Harlem native, at a wedding in New York City in 1938. Soon after they met, Morrie left the East Coast for California and eventually asked Betty to join him, which according to Betty, was his idea of a marriage proposal. Morrie, however, was plenty romantic, a quality that, he once explained, didn’t have to revolve around the words ‘I love you.’

“Love is possessive, it’s controlling and demanding. The word that I would rather use instead is ‘caring’. You care about people. ‘Care’, to me, has a much deeper meaning,” he told The Guardian newspaper in a 2017 interview. “Love is an esoteric word, but one that people also use to mean all sorts of off-hand things. ‘I love playing tennis,’ and such. I hug Betty constantly, I kiss her constantly, I care very much about her.”

For Thormaehlen to capture that sentiment in his photo, it would take a little bit of Morrie’s ‘show don’t tell’ philosophy.

Morrie plants a kiss on Betty's cheek during their shoot for "Aging Gracefully." Photo by Karsten Thormaehlen. — Morrie plants a kiss on Betty’s cheek during their shoot for “Aging Gracefully.” Photo by Karsten Thormaehlen

“They were sitting side by side, and I said, ‘this doesn’t work, ‘can you do something more fun?'” Thormaelen explained of the shot. “So he kissed her and she was totally surprised and you could see that on her face.”

That kiss and look of delight may best encapsulate what the photographer says he hopes his collection of photos conveys: “That you can have fun at any age.”

And as for a commonality among his subjects who have hit the century mark — the secret to longevity if you will — having fun is closely related.

“The one thing you always find is a sense of humour,” Thormaelen says. “The certain view of humour onto life and even on their very late life.”

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