Conducting deeply personal interviews with her subjects also changed her image making. “Sitting down with someone and asking them to share their life story is really vulnerable but also empowering and very significant,” she said. “I was continually struck by how personal people were willing to be with us.” In other projects, like “Every Breath We Drew,” she took out all extraneous information. But in “To Survive on This Shore,” she let details of her subjects’ lives creep in, even including photos of objects.

Ms. Dugan and Ms. Fabbre envisioned their project as equal parts activism and art. The images and quotes will form an exhibition and book, and the work has also been acquired by the Kinsey Institute, the Sexual Minorities Archive and the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria. Ms. Fabbre plans to use the interviews in her scholarly research, and they have begun sharing their work with nonprofits for training and activism. They hope that the broader theme of aging can resonate with people beyond the transgender community.

Just as crucially, they want the work to serve as a visual record of the joys, traumas, fears and hopes of older transgender people that the younger transgender community — which often has no role models — can use to learn what the future might hold.

“Many of the people in the project have been out and have been working on progress for the trans community since as early as the 1970s,” Ms. Dugan said. “We were looking back at 45 years of advocacy and education and life experience, and I really wanted to capture that because I think sometimes our collective history is lost. We wanted to create a more broad and complex portrait of what it looks like to be an older transgender person.”