A bit more procrastination and some thoughts about children and photography

Pointless

Despite the title of this blog I actually have managed to take some of the photographs required for the early exercises of this course and am collecting them in a file on my computer.  I wonder why I've not popped them up here yet as presumably it doesn't matter if I have to return to them and add and replace as I go. 

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 21^st 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?

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[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.

Meeting my tutor, Sally Mann and projections

Having published this blog, I have just noticed that the heading is somewhat misleading.  Sally Mann is not my tutor.  Andrew Conroy is.  Sally Mann is a topic in the blog.  So... I am at the end of week three following my enrolment with the OCA and finally I am beginning to gather pictures together for the early exercises, as well as learning the importance of grammar and precision in my writing.

I also met my tutor, Andrew Conroy - not Sally Mann, via Skype (which was a bit weird) but useful as now I have a deadline for my first assignment, which is in February.  Yikes!!

I mentioned to Andrew that I had been doing a few family portrait shoots and he asked me if I knew Sally Mann’s work and in particular Immediate Family.

After our call I remembered that I had seen something about her in a *documentary I own about photography a little while back, and recall liking her photographs.  I looked at her website and today watched most of a film about her work, What Remains (2005).

The documented controversy about Immediate Family is hardly surprising but not solely, I think, because the children are naked in many of the shots, although that is what was focused on at the time and in the film.  The nakedness is merely an expression of a mentality that has always been challenging to the status quo. 

The progressive lifestyle that the photographs depict is extremely evocative and not very comfortable for some, I think.  There is a feral quality to the children in the photos and the nakedness is nothing compared to the free, expressive, sophisticated looks in their eyes, evident on their faces and in the physicality of their bodies.  Children are usually expected to conform, behave, agree with the adults and generally not get in the way,  although they tend to do none of those things in my experience; the adult world does not on the whole like to think that children should be encouraged and allowed to be so unconstrained.

There is a very clear rejection, I think, of that type of mentality where these children are concerned; and the photographs sort of shove that rejection in the viewers face.  These children are free and utterly at home in their humanist existence; they are also absolutely happy to stare out at the world and say, look at us – we’re not as many of you think we ought to be. And we like it that way!  And perhaps even; what are you going to do about it?

I’m not saying the nakedness isn’t challenging for some.  But I am saying that the nakedness is just part of something more fundamental.  It is the evident ethos in the overall work that is so uncomfortable for people.  Perhaps I’m stating the obvious here!

And I hope I’m not being judgmental as I find her work fascinating; it's certainly extremely powerful.  (I am probably extremely envious of the carefree, avant-garde, unconventional choices Sally Mann and her husband were able to make about their family.)  But choice is a crucial element here because it is the result of rather a privileged existence.  Not necessarily financially privileged, although that comes into it.  But for poor children free, open, expressive living is not deemed suitable.  Middle class, arty people ‘get away’ with it.

If obviously poor children are seen naked and filthy jumping in and of lakes I am certain that we viewers might have had a subtly different reaction.  The indignant would still have been indignant but very possibly with a different outcome.  I know Sally Mann was told she might be arrested for exposing her children’s nakedness to the world.  Had she been a different sort of person and not the photographer she would, I believe, certainly have been arrested – perhaps that’s just my perception though.

How does Sally Mann’s work affect me?  I am taking photos of my family and for money of other people’s families.  Yes, I want my photos to be distinctive and at the moment I don’t believe they are generally, although I do try to record something authentic and genuine in amongst the traditional expected shots.  However, as things stand, the photos that are chosen by clients are generally the safest, most traditional ones.  For me the challenge is to produce work for that part of my life that is resonant and mine, but also 'sellable'.  Perhaps this may be a source of conflict in my development but I think conflicting tension is a good thing for creativity.

I had to stop watching the documentary just as Sally Mann was entering a forensic study where dead bodies were decomposing in the open.  I am intrigued and perhaps even preferred what I had seen already of related work to the family photos, so I look forward to finding out more very soon.

Some photography of my own too…

I took the above photograph at Battersea Park.  I’ve placed it upside down.  I’ve done this with a few photographs of mine and think I will continue to.  I’m certain it’s been done a million times before but I know far too little about art and artists so would be very interested to find out more.  Perhaps it’s a clichéd and hackneyed thing to do??

Nevertheless, I am fascinated by how we project – and we all do – parts of ourselves, or in severe cases, much of ourselves on to other people and the world around us. 

I am struck by how it is possible to exist within a projected reality as if were indeed actuality.  For some it then becomes the reality.  

I would like to explore this more.  

*Documentary: The Genius of Photography:  How photography has changed our lives.  BBC DVD