Lux Control

Lux Control

by Colin Pantall

Pale children stare out of empty landscapes, their young bodies clothed in strangely patterned tweed and wool. Half adult, half child, they are the invention of Loretta Lux, a photographer whose digital sorcery has created a magical world that sits somewhere between fantasy and reality.

Born in Dresden in 1969 and now based in Monaco, Lux’s work is partly inspired by her early childhood in East Germany.

“My life as a child in the DDR was very dull, but at the weekends my grandparents would take me to museums. The pictures I could most connect with were those with children in them.”

Inspired by Old Masters and German romantic artists of the 19th century, Lux initially studied painting but, she says, “...it was too messy - all those paints and the turpentine. So one reason I took up photography is because it isn’t messy.

“Another reason is painting has a long history and there are painters like Velasquez and Caspar David Friedrich and you can’t compete with them. Instead I thought I would approach painting through photography.”

So in 1999, Lux ( she chose her name a year later on the eve of her first group show). started taking photographs “Children are a fascinating subject for me, so I started taking pictures of children. At first, I only wanted to make good pictures. I didn’t theorise about the pictures. That came later.”

“I started with my nephew because he was available. I’m not the kind of person who is happy approaching people on the street,” says Lux, who has no children of her own. She continued to photograph the children of friends and relatives, rejecting commissions to focus on children that she found visually fascinating.

And that is Lux’s real gift. She recognises the power of children and chooses her models accordingly. Maria, perhaps her favourite model, radiates a wisdom beyond her years, the girl with a fish has an all-knowing self-awareness and the red-haired girl in the Rose Garden possesses a distant gaze that takes us into a world we can only imagine.

“In my work, I combine photography, painting and digital technology. I spend a great deal of time arranging the photograph in a way that is very similar to what a painter does on the canvas.”

“I start with a mental image, with a particular idea, which I then try to portray. I carefully select the clothes, the models and the backdrop (which is often painted by Lux), I have a few photo-sessions with the children and pick the best pictures. I then spend a great deal of time manipulating the image into what I want. It takes me 3 months to come up with a final image that I can get printed, but most of the time I don’t get that far.”

“I started with a digital camera right away because for me conventional photography was never a viable option. I want more control than simply depending on what’s in front of the camera.”

“I don’t like to say what equipment I use. I don’t get paid to advertise cameras, so why should I drop names,” she says before letting slip that she uses a Leica - a Digilux in other words. The cheque, one suspects, is not in the post. Not that Lux needs it. She’s sold almost US $5 million worth of prints in the last year.

What makes Lux’s work so fascinating is the otherworldliness of the images she creates. Partly this is due to the intensity of the children and the mystical emptiness of her backgrounds, but also because of the clothes she selects - clothes with colours, patterns and materials that, though very recognisable, have an almost alien quality.

“I have them wearing these clothes because they suit the image,” explains Lux. “I couldn’t do a picture of a child wearing Adidas clothes for example. I was born in Dresden in the DDR and they are the kind of clothes I would wear when I was a child in the 1970s. And because in the DDR we were always 10 years behind everywhere else, they look like clothes from the 1960s.”

So the Study of a Girl features a short sleeveless dress in a diagonal check of white, orange and sludgy green, a two-buttoned pocket on the chest. The Boy wears a flesh coloured shirt and a pair of shorts that make you itch just looking at them. Best of all is Megumi, who wears a short-sleeved knitted top in baby blue under a matching sleeveless pocketed dress.

Despite the subject matter Lux says, “The work is not about children. The images are a metaphor for childhood, innocence and the lost paradise of childhood.”

“There are also things to do with my own childhood. Like all Germans I grew up with stories by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. I think they had a strong impact on my imagination. Also, things like the teddy bear (in Girl with a Teddy Bear) is mine, so the pictures do have a lot to do with memory - with visual memory. The work is not autobiographical but I get inspiration from my memories of my own childhood.”

Lux’s children seem embedded half in childhood and half in the adult world. They don’t live in a Victorian-style state of innocence, but as mini-adults in their own right. “In a child you can already see hints of the person he is to become and in the grown up you will find traces of the child he used to be,” explains Lux.

This view is something Lux accentuates with her careful arrangements of props and hands. One girl holds a loaf of bread, another ( digitally manipulated into gripping the slippery creature) a fish. The Bride clasps her hands together, a girl in a tango-hued top has her arms crossed, while the red-haired girl in the green buckled dress hides them behind her back as she stands in her magical walled Rose Garden.

Sometimes, Lux changes the hand or head size, transforming posture and pose into something very strange. Particularly striking is The Walk. This features 2 girls in buckled shoes, their heads a shade too big for their shrunken bodies, their shoulders too sloping as they stand, one foot in front of the other on a barren path. The children gaze, all-knowing and all-seeing at the camera, against a backdrop that is both harsh and unforgiving - perhaps like childhood itself.

“I wouldn’t like to be a child again and have to depend on other people,” says Lux. “There are no perfect parents and it’s better to be in control of yourself I think. Children are beautiful, but childhood isn’t,”


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