We have a mission

As a young father, Didier Carluccio was plunged into the world of the Great Age by chance during a birthday celebration in a retirement home. He took out his film camera and captured the moment.

Very quickly, he discovered the hospices with their long waxed corridors, the retirement homes with tired brick facades and large windows overlooking forgotten gardens. Places full of old-world charm with creaking parquet floors, faded wallpaper, and the scents of wood and evening soup.

There, in rooms where ten beds were still crammed together, surrounded by floral curtains and yellowed crucifixes, he photographed. Faces at the edge of their beds, the light from a skylight falling just so on a wrinkled cheek.

It was in these old buildings that the portraits were born, one by one, as if time had stopped to finally take a breath.

For a long time, the house smelled of developer fluid; portraits of elders dried above the bathtub while the children brushed their teeth in the kitchen.

Then, gradually, the film rolls disappeared from the fridge.
A computer took its place, a printer hummed, and suddenly color appeared: restoring the red to neatly tied scarves, the blue to tired eyes, the pink to cheeks that no longer expected to be seen.

The Great Age transitions to color.

One morning, the newspaper Libération opened with a full page: “Les vieux dans les yeux” (Looking the old in the eye). Le Monde followed, the AFP broadcasted, and France 3 filmed a segment in the corridors of a care home.

The French Hospital Federation commissioned a national campaign; the portraits made headlines everywhere.

In a few months, the name Carluccio became the reference when speaking of the Great Age.

National recognition followed.

Jules grew up among these faces; they were hanging in the living room, suspended in the bathroom, sleeping on the dinner table.

He knows these tens, hundreds of thousands of portraits like one knows their own grandparents.

The gesture is the same, the patience too, the way of sitting close to our elders and reading their history through their wrinkles and gazes.

The Carluccio name endures alongside the Great Age.

Everywhere the same gentleness, the same tear on the cheek of an elder rediscovering their own beauty. A child places their hand on a wrinkled hand, a portrait is created, a trace remains.

Le Grand Âge est là où l’Homme a mis le pied.
The Great Age exists wherever Mankind has set foot.

The right to memory and to beauty does too.