The over-50s market is where the money is, says Ageist founder David Stewart
As a jet-setting photographer, Stewart lived the high life in the 1980s, until ‘digital changed everything in the 2000s’. That is when he stumbled upon a market that was being largely ignored. He now runs the Ageist media company that focuses on people blazing new trails in later life
Small-town boy I was born in a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, in 1958. We moved to Rochester, New York, when I was four, and I lived there until the summer of fifth grade. I spent the rest of my childhood in a farm town called Geneseo, south of Rochester. There were about 5,000 people in the town. There were fewer than 100 people in my high school graduating class. Most of them still live in that town. It was a lovely place to grow up.
School’s out My mum was a single mum. She got divorced when I was in the fifth grade, which was quite rare back then. Then my father was killed in a car accident three years later. So it was just me, my mum and my younger brother.
I didn’t really like high school. I was quiet and they thought I wasn’t very smart. But I knew that wasn’t the case. To prove them wrong, I did two years in engineering school studying mechanical engineering, and it’s still the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I got honours there but I felt I wasn’t really being educated, so I tried to get into their industrial design school but they told me I had no aptitude for anything creative. So I left and moved to Boston.
There’s this group of people out there aged 50 and above who spend a lot of money and yet nobody talks to them. And they’re usually depicted like they’re in need of immediate medical attention, rather than looking like me and my friends.
Photo finish I enrolled in Boston University and did a degree in political science – I wanted a liberal arts degree, but because it had the word “science” in it I thought it would be a better fit for me. It was a ridiculous decision. But going to a liberal arts school is about one-tenth the work of going to an engineering school, so I had all this extra time. I studied photography at a little technical school pretty much every night for about two years. I graduated and, as only a 22-year-old can do, I declared myself a photographer.
The big time I had a lot of success early on. I had my first full-page ad in Vogue when I was 23 or 24. And then I moved to Paris. That was the big time – or at least I thought it was. I was a young photographer from America and everybody wanted to meet me. It was the early 1980s and I was going to nightclubs like Les Bains Douches.
Eventually I ran out of money and had to leave. So I moved to New York, and that was the real big time. I lived in a loft in Tribeca and things were pretty wild. I went to Studio 54 a few times but I was more into the punk rock scene, so it was CBGBs, Mudd Club, stuff like that.
Fly boy In New York, nobody cares about anything you’ve done before. The only thing that matters is what you’ve done in New York. So I had to start at the bottom again. I did a little work at Interview, where I met Andy Warhol. Then I started working for magazines like Glamour, Mademoiselle, Esquire and GQ.