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Pointless |
Since my first assignment is due on the 24th of this month I'd better get on with it!
As well as procrastinating about the exercises I have also been thinking a great deal about Sally Mann and her work following last week's blog. And bizarrely one of the people I follow on Flickr uploaded some images by an architect and amateur photographer who published a book in 1923 called The Garden of Adonis which instantly made me think of the photographs by Sally Mann. In it were children, although probably quite importantly - not his own children, posing in quite similar positions to the ones in Immediate Family. They were from another time - and the lighting was very different but there was without a doubt in my own mind (perhaps no-one else) a connection: Victorian photographic methods, dancing children wearing very little, playfulness, a lack of comfort for the 21st century viewer.
I’ve been wondering what, other than relationship, sets these images apart. Why has one photographer been named the best in America[1]and one consigned to history, forgotten in the main except by people with ‘specialist’ interests –photography or otherwise. Both books are listed in the UK Government Justice Departments’ Public Protection Manual: Chapter 11 Inappropriate Materials Guidance as books that are "indicative of a paedophile interest" and are not allowed into prisons. It’s quite fascinating and I’m not sure what I feel about all of this. I was quite uncomfortable scanning through the Inappropriate Materials Guidance document – that’s for sure, felt a little paranoid that I was instantly going to pop up on some sort of watch list, but also began to wonder about our relationship with images of children more widely.
There is a great deal of discomfort and nervousness amongst all of us where children and images are concerned. My mother’s albums aren’t exactly littered with naked snaps of me but they do exist; in particular one I remember very clearly is of my brother and I sunburnt to a crisp with white marks where our swimming costumes were, standing in the bath together and smiling broadly at the camera. I’d post it here but feel somehow that would be wrong. The 70s was a different era and sunburnt naked children are sort of frowned upon now, certainly for being sunburnt in the first place and then of course for being naked on the Internet.
Yet, such pictures were ubiquitous and developed in chemists all over the world in the 70s and 80s. Something changed though and although it seems the proliferation of pornography and in particular distressing stories of wildly inappropriate images of young children is the obvious answer, I wonder if the Internet and it’s darker elements are expressions of something that was happening anyway in our collective consciousness rather than the cause of it.
I seem to remember in the early 90s, a female newsreader being very angry that photos of her young children were not developed or retained because they were naked. Was this before the Internet became so powerful or afterwards? I can’t find anything about it but I’m pretty sure it was quite a while ago.
Today in 2013 seemingly the only acceptable images of naked children are of newborn babies. These babies are often moulded, as they sleep, into peculiar positions that are rather coquettish and sometimes unnatural. In come cases adults’ hands and arms holding the babies in precarious positions are edited out so the tiny infants appear to be sleeping alone on top of rocking horses or in hammocks for instance. They often wear nothing but a bow round their tiny unformed skulls. I’m intrigued by the social psychology behind these images. And how or if they might relate in any way to the abhorrence we have of nakedness in older children.
I don’t think that unnaturally posed babies are anything new and particular to our society. I don’t know very much about art history but I am aware that bodies of adults and children were deliberately painted with unrealistic proportions and positions throughout, as discussed briefly in an article about retouching I came across this week - http://www.fastcodesign.com/3025262/a-brief-history-of-retouching. But I do think that there is something – I don’t understand what – about the images I’ve described that is reflective of us as a society now. Reflective of our nervousness about children being naked at all, about children in general, and about our role as parents and adults, which is perhaps less authoritative than it’s ever been[2].
I have continued looking at Sally Mann’s photography and to be honest am more comfortable looking at the images of dead rotting corpses than the ones of her family. Immediate Family was published in the 80s before the Internet flourished and there was a furore then. Was there also an outcry when Oliver Hill published his Garden of Adonis or what about Lewis Carol and his images of clothed young girls, which are so contentious, now looked at through 21st century eyes[3]?
Children and photographic imagery is I think a very contentious area and brimming with neurosis – justified in part of course but perhaps also related to an increasing unease about childhood.
I’ve got so many books about photography to read since starting this course, galleries to visit, photographs to take. But I think I need to re-read The Invention of Childhood by Hugh Cunningham. It ends with the sentences, “We certainly wouldn’t want to put our seven year olds up a chimney to clean it. But children could do these things. So fixated are we on giving our children a long and happy childhood that we downplay their abilities and their resilience. To think of children as potential victims in need of protection is a very modern outlook, and it probably does no-one a service”. This sentiment seems to me to be pertinent somehow. Of course, abuse or exploitation of any person, no matter his or her age should be addressed and condemned emphatically and wholeheartedly. But we, our society, (I) are all extraordinarily worried about our children and photographic images and I can’t help feeling we are bordering on the hysterical, if we haven't indeed tipped over.
All something to explore further. And I still haven't answered my earlier question; what makes one of the people I began this blog about America's best photographer and the other somewhat peculiar and mostly forgotten.
For now I
must do some editing and perhaps even upload an image or two, none of which are
of my children, for the introductory exercises of this course. Before I go I'll breifly say the photograph at the top of this blog is called Pointless. It was a direct, albeit probably unnessessary, response to someone who said he didn't like my photographs because he thought they were pointless. I was going to write a blog about the point of any photography at all especially when we are inundated daily with so images - but got carried away with the above. Perhaps something I can think about in the future at some point.
I just wanted to add – I’ve used footnotes, which seems slightly OTT for a blog but I wanted to indicate where concepts or information I allude to originate rather than bang on even more in a blog that is probably already too long. Perhaps this is something I should discuss at the next tutorial/Skype meeting thing?
[1] Time Magazine – named “America’s best
photographer” 2001
[2] Frank Ferudi – Paranoid Parenting 2008 and
Wasted 2009
[3] I’d quite like to read Karoline Leaches
book In the Shadow of the Dreamchild
which questions long held views about Lewis Carol (Charles Dodgson) and his relationships with young girls.
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