(Having written this blog I realise it is more a reflection about the book and how it relates to my work rather than some sort of review. I guess I have yet to write that up now and will file this blog under reflection rather than Photographers and their Work, although should probably provide a link once I've completed the blog about the actual work in the book.)
I
recently bought a book called Presumed Innocence, which accompanied an
exhibition of the same name, curated by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo at the Decordoca
Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts, from February 2 to April 27,
2008.
If I
were interested in coincidences and synchronicity it would be hard to avoid
attaching some importance to the fact that these dates are so familiar. My oldest son’s birthday is the 27th April and my middle son was born in February 2008 although on the 1st
and not the 2nd. Oh, yes! I
am fascinated by such co-incidences: I do, however, take comfort,
as it would just be too weird, and simultaneously feel slight disappointment that the
birthdate of my second son misses out on a perfect match with the exhibition
dates by 24 hours.
I
ordered this book because my tutor suggested it to me. It is the most I’ve ever spent on a single
book but thanks to a site called Bookfinder.com I think and hope I located a decently
priced copy. Due to the combination of
intense enthusiasm that I feel towards my photography, together with a long
held fascination and deep sense of yearning to know and learn about childhood,
I felt that the relative expense was warranted.
So when the book arrived (it took a long time) I was immensely pleased
to read one of the opening passages written by Anne Higonnet, titled, ‘the
history, crisis, and recovery of ideal childhood.’
The
passage is an adapted version of the introduction to Higonnet’s book, Pictures of Innocence: The History and
Crisis of Ideal Childhood, and I feel compelled to buy that book too
now. It would without a doubt fit well
into my growing collection of books about children, childhood and its place in
our society and other cultures, and about our understanding of childhood and
how it has evolved and is evolving over time.
Books titled “What are Children
For?”, Our Babies Ourselves, Children’s Games in Streets and Playgrounds
and The Invention of Childhood along
with Mothers and Others, Paranoid
Parenting and simply The Anthropology of Child Development
all sit proudly amongst other similar titles on my shelves so Presumed
Innocence is a welcome addition. I
hope I am not merely demonstrating here that I can indeed read but am instead
finding a connection that I hadn’t really made with photography, not
consciously anyway, before picking up Presumed
Innocence.
Very
soon after I gave birth to my first son I was struck by a profound sense of
purpose suddenly and for the first time in my life. This is not unusual as many mothers and probably
fathers, although by no means all, feel equally ‘justified’ when they become
parents. What is unusual about me is
that my own mother moved away from us when I was 11 and for the first time when
I became a mother myself, I started perhaps only semi-consciously at first to question why and
how that might have happened. Although
other people often said it was unusual, for me it had been the norm but once I
had my own child I began to see beyond the experience I had had up to then.
That
I suppose is what has informed my reading and deep desire to understand
children, maternal instincts and parenting styles or lack of in the world. From there I have wanted to know why we treat
children the way we do, very differently in some customs across cultures and
but also with a universality in other ways, even across different species’. I have also become very interested in how
children develop and the travails they must travel through to reach adulthood
intact or not as the case may be.
Young
mammalian children are adapted to be cute and endearing in order to ensure they
survive, so the theory goes, so ideally babies and young children are less
likely to be abandoned by carers [1]. In addition throughout history children have been crucial to the survival of
families as they worked from a young age and contributed to the economy of families
and communities in which they lived [2]. According to Anne Higonnet in her introduction to Presumed Innocence and also
Hugh Cunningham in The Invention of
Childhood [3] something about they way we in the West perceive children changed somewhere
around the 17th century and a Romantic ideal about how children
ought to be evolved[4]. At the same time children were being devalued,
so that by the Victorian era were being sent down coalmines and up chimneys or thrown in poor houses
whilst simultaneously a perfect notion of the ideal childhood reached its
zenith, although it is probable in reality a mere handful of only the most
fortunate benefitted from anything that resembled the nostalgic, sun kissed,
curly haired, fair skinned, country dwelling image that persists today. Now we are left, and crucially children are
left without a clear sense of purpose [5]. Often the cuteness and attractiveness of
children fails to protect them from violent and distressing treatment in a
deeply anti-adaptive way. Sometimes the
theory fails and children are not cute or adorable enough or at all but instead
seen as demons or simply surplus to requirements. I wonder what emerges if you begin to look at
images of children within this context.
The
introductory passages in Presumed
Innocence point out that the romantic ideal is beginning to change, at any
rate within the world of art, and Sally Mann in particular is mentioned as one
of the first to challenge and question the historical ideal with her work in Immediate Family [6]
However,
the amount of soft focused, golden photographs of young children looking
innocent and precious in a field of flowers for example, perhaps with a
nostalgic filter and a fake sunburst edited in during post processing being
sold is pretty high and there is much demand for this sort of style of
photography. If not, then babies wrapped
in fluff, coiled up in baskets or dangling in a tiny hammock and photographed
in the style of high-end advertising may do.
As
someone who has begun to earn a bit of money taking photographs of children
and families I am acutely aware of the styles and trends that I must compete
with and to be honest am always faintly surprised when people are complimentary
about my own work as I don’t use filters and actions (other than skin smoothing
and then only mostly with adult women who are concerned about their lines), am
learning all the time so feel I make many mistakes, try hard to achieve something
vaguely authentic and real and can’t possibly achieve the sun kissed, modern Mcdonalds
advertising look because I don’t know how, don’t want to and don’t see children
in that vein anyway. I also wonder why
we Western humans need to market our children in this way to ourselves in any
case – what is happening to the adaptive behavior we evolved with to ensure the
survival of our offspring? When and why
we did begin marketing our kids to ourselves and is this linked to the romantic
ideal that emerged in the 17th century?
When
I first started getting into the idea of commercial photography I was adamant I
wouldn’t try to enter the family portrait market as it seemed saturated and I
didn’t think it was my thing at all.
Nevertheless, I tried it out because I had nothing better to do and the
actors I’d started with weren’t exactly banging my door down, and now it seems
that families is the way my work is going and I can’t help noticing the
connection between my reading interests and my unintended study of children
through photography. I guess I would be
vaguely lacking in awareness if I did not begin to see how I have, with little
conscious effort, found myself trying to capture images of childhood,
parenting, and families other than mine in some sort of attempt to make sense
of my own beginnings.
So
all in all, I think this book of images of children is very important for me in
one way or another. It offers me a
variety of styles to try and emulate, challenges the status quo, provides me
with a history and context in which children have been photographed and is
probably a book that I should and will look at again and again and again. The dates of the exhibition, even if one were
not intrigued by coincidences, are striking but not nearly as startling,
engaging and compelling as the photographs (about which I have not written here at all! But will do, or have done depending on when you're reading this!).
[1] Mother Nature: Maternal
Instincts and the Shaping of the Species, Sarah Hrdy Blaffer, 2000 Vintage,
Random House (First published 1999)
[2] What are Children For?
Laurie Taylor & Matthew Taylor, Short Books, 2003
[3] The Invention of Childhood,
Hugh Cunningham (& Michael Morpugo), BBC Books, 2006
[4] Presumed Innocence,
Photographic Perspectives of Children, page 15, Decordoca Museum and Sculpture
Park, 2008
[5] What are Children For?
Laurie Taylor & Matthew Taylor, Short Books, 2003
[6] Immediate Family, Sally
Mann, Apeture, 1992
No comments:
Post a Comment