It's somewhat simplistic to tie personal age with what any individual likes or dislikes as style within any given genre. Not all people start their photographic trip at the same age; the different influences that an individual absorbs are always varied.
Somebody a decade older than I am might not have begun to feel any particular interest in photography because of what was in vogue when he was a teen, and may have come to the thing in his fifties or sixties, with retirement in mind, and the sudden thought of hey, what will I do with my days? His tastes may be coloured by what he sees as contemporary work when he is at that point, or, perhaps, he might be looking at pictures on the Internet and discover the wonders of the old masters and old techniques from before his own youth, and therein see his future hobby.
On the other hand, myself, ten years younger, became addicted to the camera as a very young teen, and the ideals in mind were absolutely not about the f64 group, the influence of the Sierra Club (of whom I had never heard) nor of the works of St Ansel, about whose elevation I was just as uninformed. I was straight in at the cutting edge of the times, which is not to pretend that I was there doing my razor thing: I was simply in love with the work of those who were.
The condensed version of the above: people do whatever they do because they like it.
That they have those different views doesn't, of itself, alter the fact that there are and have always been recognized "boxes" into which everything falls, more or less. Call yourself the most free of the free spirits, and unless that freedom is expressed by electing to do nothing, your output cannot avoid falling into one of those little containers, or be uncomfortably suspended across the edges between one or two of them; a hedged bet of a style, then.
For myself, I think I have come to the natural end of my outdoor photographic trip. An experience on Wednesday of this week saw me hustled by a woman around twenty-five or so years of age who came out of nowhere from behind me on a quiet street in this little town, asked me the way to a bus stop, made some meaningless chat about nationalities and then came up close to hug me, as if in gratitude for telling her where the stops are. I was uncomfortable from the start, but when she made this proximity move I pushed her away as hard as I could, feeling I was being set up for a fake sex assault charge. Her hands all over me, I got away and a few seconds later discovered there was no longer a Rolex on my wrist.
There was no woman to be seen either, when I turned to look for her. The following three hours were spent sitting around in the Guardia Civil offices wondering if my third heart event was cutting in. Anyway, the point that became clear to me was that old guys, nice things and the street do not mix. I consider I was lucky it was a woman and I did not get punched, stabbed or shot for a pretty bauble.
Once lucky, the idea of doing it all again with cameras seems silly. Age fixes everything.
