An intimate portrait of ageing, dementia, and devotion

More than 6.7 million Americans are living with dementia, the number expected to double in coming years with COVID-19 infection associated with increased risk for the degenerative disease. 

When her mother Carole was diagnosed with vascular dementia, photographer Cheryle St. Onge became her primary caregiver, eventually leaving work in 2018 to provide round the clock care. ​“She was very aware. She would tell people: ​‘I’m losing my mind,’” St. Onge says. ​“She wasn’t scared. She was very mobile and had a lot of energy, and she seemed to understand what was happening and explain it to people.” 

But the inevitable tide was taking its toll. ​“She’d be in the garden but pulling up perennials instead of weeds,” St. Onge remembers. ​“She was certainly depressed, because I think enough of her awareness was there, and I was tanking. All we did was cry. I mean, I would cry and she would comfort me. There was no sadness on her part. It was very clinical and detached from the emotional part.” 

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Bereft, St. Onge spoke with artist friends, who encouraged her to make photographs. She wrestled with the idea, her ambivalence eventually giving way to necessity. She told her mother to move to the corner of the room where there was more light for a photograph. ​“Her reaction was stupefying,” St. Onge says. ​“She put down her word puzzles, pushed her hair back, and sat up like a 1950s starlet. Something came out that I never could have expected.” 

Carole was a natural in front of the camera, a position inherently fraught with questions of consent that form the heart and soul of this project. Like babies and toddlers, who also cannot consent, the ethics of the encounter lie in the hands of the photographer. Working from a place born of her own mental and physical health, St. Onge says: ​“It became: Let’s go outside and make a picture. Let’s walk down to the river and get in the sun. We get some exercise and we’re having fun, and then while we’re at this beautiful place, let’s make a picture. That’s how life went ​’til very close to the end.” 

St. Onge’s mother died in 2020, but her final years are preserved with a majestic dignity and glorious silliness that forms the heart and soul of Calling the Birds Home (L’Artiere). Launching at Paris Photo, November 13 – 16, 2025, St. Onge’s monograph is poignant, poetic, playful, and profound, standing as an enduring testament to the power of love. 

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Born to a physics professor and an artist, photographer, St. Onge enjoyed a magical childhood amid the horses, cows, and students milling amid the verdant expanses of University of New Hampshire in Durham. Grad students joined the dinner table for lively conversations on science and math, and they’d winter at a nearby cottage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. 

When St. Onge was 14, the unthinkable happened: her father was killed in a car accident the day after Christmas. Badly disfigured in the crash, St. Onge spent years dealing with the trauma and recovery from that tragic day. Carole never remarried. They lived side by side on a farm in Durham for 20 years, St. Onge married with three children of her own. 

Her large format photography practice focused on the natural world. ​“She would tag along with me,” St. Onge says. ​“If we took a road trip, she would bring along her needlepoint and do it in the car while I was driving.”

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It wasn’t until Calling the Birds Home that St. Onge turned her large format photography practice, which focused on the natural world, into a celebration of life unlike any other. ​“Some of it was self-preservation,” she says. ​“We need something to get up each day. There has to be bright light, sunshine, nice music, and we need to look great because that will make us feel better. We need to do things with love and beauty that will keep pulling us through.”

Calling the Birds Home by Cheryle St. Onge is published by L’Artiere.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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