Part 1: Age of Isolation

“Nursing homes are sad places. People are abandoned there,” says Gloria Murray, sixty-six, a Jamaican immigrant who worked for more than two decades as a health aide at a nursing home. Over the course of her career, Murray became close to many of her clients. It was important to her that they be shown kindness and respect. In Jamaica, she says, “we take care of our old.”

Yet as Murray grew old herself, she quickly learned that no one was going to take care of her. In 2010, a fire destroyed her home in New York. Homeless for two years, she struggled to navigate the city’s shelter system. Life there was unbearable, she says: “It was drugs, pimps, the whole lot. I never knew it would come to this.”

Continue reading I Can Only Pray: Portraits of Older Immigrants →

Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com