Introduction: Real or Imaginary?
Chapter 1: The Landscape of the Romantic Child
Chapter 2: Clothing the Innocent Child
Chapter 3: The Look of the Knowing Child
Chapter 4: Constructed Childhoods
Conclusion: Real and Imaginary
In The Rose Garden, Lux controls landscape, costume and colour. As we have already seen, the picture references historical representations of childhood as well as referring to Communist ideas of childhood from her own upbringing in the former East Germany. So much has been put into the picture by Lux, it would seem there is little room left for the girl herself. However, despite all of Lux’s interventions, Emily still dominates the image, rising above the Romantic, the Innocent and the Communist Child to have integrity within herself.
So although Lux creates parallel worlds for the girl to inhabit, the girl inhabits a world that is not controlled by Lux. The power of the picture lies in the girl herself, and something she portrays. This ability to portray the child is connected to Lux’s working practice and also the idea of the Knowing Child, of which the girl in the Rose Garden is a prime example. To examine why she is a Knowing Child, it is necessary to look at the work of photographers who have broken with the idea of the Innocent Child to create a more sophisticated, child-centred vision of childhood.
Foremost among these photographers is Sally Mann. In The New Mothers (figure 9), Mann portrays her two daughters dressed up as new mothers. To the left of frame a doll sits in a pram, while mid-frame Jessie holds one of the pram’s handles. In the other hand she holds a candy cigarette. Virginia wears heart-shaped glasses and stands with one hand on her hips, the other clutching a baby. Both girls are barefoot, their bodies tilted slightly to the left. They wear creased summer dresses and stare in a desultory manner that confronts and accuses. They smoke, go barefoot and in true southern style appear to frankly not give a damn. If the pretence were continued we’d find they drink, do drugs and go on one-night stands with strangers they meet at roadhouse rib-nights. These new mothers are Bad Mothers.
Figure 9: The New Mothers
The New Mothers is a typical example of Sally Mann’s work. It is a picture which upsets “cherished conventions of idyllic childhood” (Higonnet, 1998 p.103) and is “not easy to look at”. Here, the costumes the children wear portray mothermood. Yet, unlike the portrait of George and Francis Villiers they do not show the adult mothers the girls will become, nor are they a costume of disguise as worn by Offy in The Age of Innocence. And though the picture may have been set up by Mann, it features clothes that were originally chosen by the girls. So when Higonnet writes that the picture shows Mann “ripping at old fantasies of a naturally ideal innocence” (Higonnet, 1998 p.204), it might be more accurate to say that the picture shows the girls ripping at those fantasies. Rather than showing Sally Mann’s view of motherhood, it shows us how Jessie and Virginia see motherhood - and carelessly-dressed, smoking mothers might not be ten-a-penny on Sally Mann’s country home, but in the wilder world of West Virginia, they certainly are.
So Virginia and Jessie stare out at us, their gazes manufactured both out of their games-playing and out of their quoted boredom at repeated posing for their mother’s picture taking (Woolcock, 1992). Virginia’s eyes look out at us, dark and with bags under them, the fatigue of childhood melding with that of her imagined white-trash motherhood. Their dress and pouts present a child’s eye view of the adult world and in so doing it also shows us the child’s world. Jessie and Virginia are mimicking what they have seen and bringing it into their children’s dressing-up game. There is no romantic oneness with nature in this image, no fabricated innocence or imaginary idylls.
Higonnet writes about the “primal origins” of motherhood and the violent emotions of caring, loving and always separating from a being that was once part of her (Higonnet, 1998). Similarly, Katherine Tanko writes of the emotional roller coaster of motherhood, the primitive urges of looking after a child whose emotional life reveals “her struggle with that violent and beautiful thing called the human condition” (Tanko, 2005). So just as motherhood is founded on dark and primal forces, so it is apparent in childhood, whether it be in the death, sex and violence preoccupations of Higonnet’s childhood (Higonnet, 1998 p.205) or the childhood fantasies of Sally Mann’s Immediate Family. In The New Mothers, we are presented with children who live in their own world - a child’s world where the dark shadows of sex, violence and death are ever-present in a form more primal and subsconscious than that experienced in the adult world. All Mann’s work does is show us the child’s world is as dark and complex as that of the adult.
The darkness and complexity of this world is not conveyed through the costume of Mann’s children, nor by anything mediated by Mann. Rather it is conveyed by the cold look of Virginia (Jessie is very much a follower in this picture). World-weary fatigue combines with a barely concealed exasperation to create an image of a child’s ennui with her photographer mother. Mann may have directed much of this picture, but this gaze belongs to Virginia alone. Mann’s repeated retaking of pictures was a tiresome procedure for her children ( Woolcock, 1992), but it was a retaking that had a purpose. By taking the same picture again and again, it created a gap for the children to inhabit - a gap where the children are not acting but instead are expressing themselves. Their emotions may be negative - those of impatience, irritation, ennui and even callousness and contempt, but those are emotions that children experience more deeply and widely than adults. So Mann replaces the inauthenticity of the staged photograph with the reality of childhoods that are replete with the emotions of the non-innocent. The New Mothers rips at two fantasies and that is what makes it so difficult for some people to look at. It rips at the idea of the selfless mother figure as well as that of the Innocent Child. Just as mothers are portrayed taking forbidden pleasures, so children are portrayed having forbidden knowledge. The Innocent Child has become The Knowing Child. As Higonnet says, “These Knowing Children have bodies and passions of their own. They are also often aware of adult bodies and passions, whether as mimics or only witnesses” (Higonnet, 1998 p.207).
Rineke Dijkstra employs a different strategy to reveal the subjects of her Beach Portraits. In her Hilton Head Portrait, she portrays the girl in the apricot bikini standing alone against the bleak background described in Chapter One. The landscape is stripped and the girl is stripped “as a means of identification” (Grundberg, 1997). Dijkstra “wants to awaken definite sympathies for the person I have photographed” (Grundberg, 1997). She does this by creating a vacuum for the person to fill. “Her camera is not an instrument of intrusion”, says Grundberg (Grundberg, 1997). However, it is an instrument of expectation. Having a camera pointed at you brings expectations of how to behave. Should one smile, be serious or aloof? Even once it has been established that the photographer does not expect something of the subject, there is still a tendency for the subject to act, to conceal herself/himself in some way. The girl in the apricot bikini could conceal herself by goofing around or acting like the glamorous adult she will become (and she has made herself up as an adult), but she does not. With Dijkstra’s passive but all-seeing lens directed at her, the girl in the apricot bikini knows something is expected of her but (under Dijkstra’s neutral direction) she is confused and unsure of what she is expected to do or who she is expected to be.
Unlike the majority of Dijkstra’s Beach Portraits subjects, the girl asked to be photographed. However, as it was getting dark, Dijkstra asked her to return the next day. In Dijkstra’s Beach Portraits monologue, Carol Ehlers says, “The girl returned, wearing make-up and jewellery, probably expecting to be directed as in a fashion shoot” (Dijkstra, 2003). The girl in the apricot bikini wants to please but she is unsure about what to do. She is stuck between two of Barthes four image-repertoires (Barthes, 1993 p.13) as she oscillates between the self she thinks she is and the self she wants others to think she is. The fashion shoot illusions have evaporated and “she looks frightened and a bit confused” (Dijkstra, 2003). The conflict between expectation and uncertainty reflects the uncertainty of her adolescence and the necessity to please that is such a mark of contemporary American womanhood (Faludi, S. 1991). There is a gap between expectation and action, and in this gap the doubt and uncertainty of the girl’s life crystallize before her and she reveals herself by gazing through the camera with a look that reveals a confused and anxious self-awareness. Despite the jewellery and make-up, she does not pretend to be somebody else, or adopt a persona determined by social expectation. Instead, she incidentally pleases the photographer by breaking through Barthes image-repertoires and being herself - an adolescent girl riddled with all the neurosis and anxiety American Culture can throw at her. This revelation of self is what is expected of her, though of course for Dijkstra to get her subjects to reveal themselves she cannot say this explicitly. And because Dijkstra does not know the girl intimately, she does not know the self that is to be revealed. Dijkstra only knows what she wants the girl to do when the girl does it. Such is the double-think of photography. Like Virginia, the girl in the apricot bikini is a Knowing Child. Her look acknowledges what the future holds and, as with Jessie, this future has bleak and tawdry elements.
The strategies employed by both Mann and Dijkstra are very similar. Their photographs are extremely controlled in terms of lighting, composition, landscape and costume. However, there is the element of the unexpected, that human element that is left to chance. Garry Winogrand said, “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed” (Dyer, 2006 p.199) and both Mann and Dijkstra could say the same thing. They photograph people to see what they look like photographed.
In the same way, Lux creates a vacuum for her children to fill. The way she does this is almost incidental, a direct result of her working practice. Her photographic sessions take place in a simple studio or outdoors, with a basic lighting set up that uses two softboxes and flash. She breaks her shooting schedule into two sessions - one that concentrates on the face, the other that concentrates on posture and pose (Pantall, 2005). In each of these sessions the child is subjected to a relentless barrage of snapping as Lux moves around her subjects. She is warm and friendly with the children but very much focussed on the job at hand. These sessions, with breaks for snacks, lunch or dinner, may last as long as 5 hours (Pantall, 2005), during which time any distraction for the child comes from their parent or guardian. In such circumstances, children inevitably get bored and distracted. Their minds wander, their imaginations take hold and they are transported into another world, a world that is reflected through their gaze.
In The Rose Garden, this gaze can run off beyond the camera, suggesting something “dreamy” and “vacant” or “determined” and “forward-looking” (Lutz, C. and Collins, J. 1991). It is the gaze that Bryson describes as “prolonged and contemplative, yet regarding the field of vision with a certain aloofness and disengagement” (Bryson, N. 1983).
This use of the gaze is what provides Lux’s images with their power. It gives us entry into the child’s world by showing us something that lies outside the control of the photographer. It is interesting to contrast this use of the gaze with images that deliberately disallow the gaze of the child.
Documentary photography and photojournalism are two areas where children have been denied by removing their gaze. Children started to be shown as part of a harsher world than that portrayed by Dodgson and Cameron in the late 19th century. Jacob Riis photographed the horrendous living conditions experienced by immigrant communities in New York’s Lower East Side. In How the Other Half Lives, (Riis, 1890) Riis constructed images to have the greatest impact possible on his middle class audience by using the ideals of the Victorian Innocent Child as a foil against which his used children, or ‘Street Arabs’ as he called them, would underline the deprivation he witnessed.
In Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters (Figure 10), we see a cluster of 3 small children huddled over a grate. They appear to be homeless, but whether this is the case we don’t know - Riis would pay children to enact scenes of crime and deprivation for him and these children are, though probably homeless, almost certainly pretending to be sleeping for the camera.
The children lie stretched out on their grate, one in the corner, his right hand resting uncomfortably on his right ankle, another snuggled into his shoulder and the third crunched up against a wall, his profile in the camera’s view. These children sit in uncomfortable poses. Their clothes are grubby and ill-fitting, their ‘home’ cold and unforgiving, and the overall sentiment is that of the feral. But of the children themselves, we know nothing. Although it is daytime, their eyes (probably under Riis’s instructions) are shut. Their gaze has been rendered void by Riis’ posing and we can only catch an idea of the world they live in through that which Riis allows us to see. Everything is in his control. We know nothing about the children because Riis shows us nothing (outside his agenda of using photography as a tool of social control).
Figure 10: Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters
This use of control was entirely in keeping with Riis’s aim, which was to make hard-hitting photographs that would horrify his privileged viewers. Riis’s message was that poverty must be eradicated, not for the sake of the poor, but for the preservation of order in society. Abigail Solomon-Godeau points out Riis’s photography was “...part of the larger enterprise of surveillance, containment and social control, and the imperatives of ‘Americanisation’” (Solomon-Godeau, 1991 p.171).
The denial of the inner world of these children helped to simultaneously present and undermine preconceived ideas of childhood. In Riis’s photographs, poverty was not just an economic fall, but a moral one too. The children were essentially innocent, but corrupted by their poverty. Riis implies that, in the right class and with the right upbringing, those children would thrive in a state of clean and wholesome innocence. The children’s fall, like the poverty in which they lived, was the fault of the (immigrant) communities which Riis photographed. In Riis’s work, children exist in a state of denied innocence and this innocence is the constant referent which gives his images of children their particular power, yet which also renders those same children absolutely impotent by denying them their own consciousness, gaze and psychological space. If Lux and Mann show examples of the Knowing Child, The Street Arabs are examples of a new category, the Unknowing Child.
Another example in which the denied, Unknowing Child features heavily is Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, which was made under the auspices of The Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographic project. The FSA was set up to move poor farmers into more profitable areas of work and under the leadership of Roy Stryker, the photographic division was devised “...to gather photographic evidence of the agency’s good works and transmit these images to the press” (Marien, 2002, p. 282).
“When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate,” Roy Stryker, the head of the photo section of the FSA said in 1972 of Migrant Mother. “To me, it was the picture of the FSA... You can see anything you want in her. She is immortal.” (Stryker and Wood, 1973).
Lange’s Migrant Mother (Figure 11) is defined both by her children and the title of the photograph. Two of her children crouch around her, their faces concealed by their hands, while in her lap lies her sleeping baby. She is weighed down by her children, by her failure to provide for them, to care for them and to protect them from the rigours of depression-era America. Florence Thompson, the Migrant Mother, may be poor and Cherokee, but really she is just a mother - a mother without a name whose photographic identity is determined by her children.
Yet while the children determine her identity as a mother, they have none themselves. The baby aside, we do not see their faces. Instead they are turned away. In the picture we are given to believe it is because of their poverty and the subsequent suffering it causes their mother, but rather it is because Lange posed the photo that way. The child’s suffering is used, in effect, to provoke sympathy
Figure 11: Migrant Mother
for the mother, but the children do not have their own identity - even their experience of their situation is given to us through the mother - whose own identity is only resolved through her children (including the absence of one older child who was not included in the picture). And because she is a mother who is defined by children who have no identity, she in effect loses all her identity outside the socially accepted ideas of what it is to be a mother. You can, as Stryker says, see anything you want in her because almost nothing is shown of her. Migrant Mother is a photographic hall of mirrors in which the identity of the mother is determined by the children and vice versa. You cannot look at one, without looking at the other.
In 1972, Florence Thompson, said, “That’s my picture hanging all over the world, and I can’t get a penny out of it.” (Rosler, 1981). The problem is it’s not really her picture at all - it’s Dorothea Lange’s vision of a generically impoverished migrant mother, a constructed image that denies both childhood and adulthood through the absence of gaze.
The portraits of Florence Holder that were produced for Dr Barnado’s are an example in which childhood is exploited for philanthropic gain. Here the child is not denied through absence of gaze, but denied through a redefinition of their childhood. In the picture of the girls taken when they were put into Barnado’s care by their mother, Florence is shown with her sister Eliza (figure 12). Her arm is protectively placed over Eliza’s shoulder and her expression is one of a caring fortitude. Her hair is combed, her dress, though dirty, is straight and she is
Figure 12
Figure 13
wearing a pair of boots. She is “poorly, but decently clad” (Mavor, 1996 p.39). However, the picture ‘artistically’ used to illustrate Florence before (figure 13) she came into Barnado’s care portrays her with unkempt hair, a rumpled dress and without boots. She has a distressed expression and is holding a newspaper as though she had been selling newpapers on the street. What Barnado called “artistic fiction” (Mavor, 1996 p.38) has been used to make images designed to elicit pity. In this picture, the posing has made Florence Holder betray herself and, through the absence of her mother and sister and the fabricated implications of maternal neglect, her emotional, social and family life. Florence Holder is clearly unhappy in the artistic fiction. This is good for Barnado - after all, she is supposed to be the unhappy, Unknowing Child that only Barnado’s can save. However, this unhappiness might also be an unconstructed response of Florence to the inauthenticity of the photograph and the message it seeks to convey. In that case, Florence has inadvertently transcended the Unknowing Child Barnado has sought to create. The reality of Barnado’s photographic practice has slipped through the gaps and transformed the Unknowing Florence Holder into a child who knows exactly what is happening.
The examples of the work of Riis, Lange and Barnado show how constructed photography can present children as Unknowing. The following chapter will examine other constructed images of childhood and question whether authenticity can occur in such constructed images and, if a picture is to be considered an authentic representation of childhood, what makes that representation authentic.
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