The Lux Effect - Chapter 4: Constructed Childhoods.

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

Lux’s photography is manipulated work that creates an image out of disparate elements. This chapter will examine photographic manipulations through a range of constructed images from Victorian times to the present. It will also look at the differences between adult preconceptions of childhood portrayed in the photograph and images that reflect the child’s world without seeking recourse to adult views of what childhood is. This point will be reinforced by briefly examining the question of the way children’s sexuality can be portrayed in the photograph from a child’s point of view or from a perspective imposed by the adult. Ploughing down a well worn, and almost barren furrow, it will also look at the idea of truth and authenticity in manipulated photography through some of the artists mentioned above and place Lux’s photography in relation to this work.

In the previous chapter, we saw how the use of gaze created the Knowing Child. Higonnet ties this idea of the Knowing Child to sexuality, referring especially to Sally Mann’s Immediate Family work to show how Mann turns her maternity into a broad-based vehicle of desire to “flaunt” the physical beauty of her children, her status as a mother and her creative power as an artist (Higonnet, 1998). This merges the personal and the professional in a way that has caused controversy and raised the question of whether Mann exploited her children for personal profit (Higonnet, 1998 p.196). It also raises the question of whether Mann’s type of constructed image does provide an authentic vision of childhood or merely presents an adult preconception of that childhood.

Much of the controversy raised by Mann’s work relies on the intimacy of her photographs, an intimacy that is based on her being the mother of Virginia, Jessie and Emmett. As Higonnet notes, this is what shocked people. Mann stepped outside the accepted bounds of motherhood by involving her children in a creative, artistic and (whisper it quietly) commercial enterprise. She stepped outside the caring mother role to photograph her children - and her children, wanting to please their mother, obliged her by posing. Mann combined two roles in a synthesis where the photographer was the mother and the mother was the photographer. As Fletcher points out, for some critics this combining of roles compromised their idealised view of a single-visioned motherhood (Fletcher, 1998). Just as the idealised mother shouldn’t drink, smoke, swear, have sex or bear occasional feelings of ill-will towards their offspring, so they shouldn’t photograph in the commercial manner that Mann did. Of course, the bounds of this idealised motherhood are as limiting as the bounds of the innocent child - both are synthetic concepts that have a barely concealed subtext of disempowerment and subjugation. So Mann is a transgressor both for having a professional non-maternal life and for portraying her children outside the realms of accepted innocence (Fletcher, 1998).

However, Mann’s images of her children are intensely physical and open to different readings. Higonnet writes about how Mann’s Last Light can be read as a Madonna and Child Image, a throttling image or a sickness or tattoo image (Higonnet, 1998). Fletcher also points out this ambiguity. In works like Virginia in the Sun and Wet Bed, although “...you know her children must be alive...” there is also a feeling that they could be dead (Fletcher, 2006).

Higonnet says Mann’s images are “erotically beautiful”. She also says that anybody who already sees children as creatures for their sexual gratification will see Mann’s work as pictures that will satisfy their carnal desires, though this was not Mann’s intention. In other words, one can see Mann’s work as art or one can see it as pornography depending on one’s particular predilections and hang-ups. This point indicates a gap between intention and affect - a gap that finds an echo in different interpretations of child sexuality and also different interpretations of what it is to be a child.

Mann’s work conveys “two conflicting messages: childhood innocence and adult sexuality” (Higonnet, p.195). However, these are concepts that are imposed on the child by the adult world. As we have seen in previous chapters, the Innocent Child is a construct created in the 19th century that still has an effect on how we see children today. Certainly Mann refers to and exploits that idealised innocence but at the same time she undermines it. Her children are Knowing Children that have a world view and inner life of their own.

And though we can impose adult sexuality on these children and so read Mann’s photographs in particular ways, this is not what Mann intended. In Vile Bodies, Mann says that child sexuality is an “oxymoron” (Woolcock, 1992). Here Mann has a self-defined view of what constitutes child sexuality. This makes sense if we think of this “child sexuality” as an adult concept imposed from an adult world where links between sex, religion, art theory, psychoanalytic theory and paedophilia predominate, where sexuality, as Goldstein notes (Goldstein, 1998), is seen in the coital sense. In this case, “child sexuality” is an oxymoron in the sense that this view of sexuality is something imposed on the child. However, if we see child sexuality as something that refers to the unconscious physicality of the child and the way they interact with themselves, others and the world around them, then it is not an oxymoron, but is a way of understanding childhood that allows the child to inhabit a world that is of their own making. This is what Mann does. Her pictures do portray child sexuality, but it is a sexuality of their own making, a sexuality that, viewed from an adult perspective, combines the Romantic Child, the Knowing Child and the Innocent Child (Fletcher, 1998). This sexuality is created by the gaps Mann allows for her children in her constructions. And it is these gaps of gaze, pose and being that make her photographs authentic records of what it is to be a child.

A contrasting view of childhood sexuality is provided by Lewis Cage. Here sexuality is imposed on the young cricketer, albeit through symbols rather than gaze and pose. The oversized bat the boy holds is a phallic symbol of the sexualised adulthood he will enter - adult sexuality was overwhelmingly a male sexuality - while the labial folds on his breeches indicate his feminine side and a childhood innocence - childhood innocence was a predominantly female trait - of which he is still part. The sexual symbolism of the ball at the opening of the wickets also affirm this dual sexual identity. Male and female, adult and child, the five-year-old Lewis Cage exists in several different worlds simultaneously. The right leg exposed by what seems to be an intentionally undone stocking, the undone flap on his breeches also suggest an available sexuality, that someone has been rummaging around where they shouldn’t. And by the grip he has on his cricket bat, the positioning of his left hand on his stomach, and his knowing smile suggest that someone could be Lewis Cage himself. Perhaps the landscape he is romantically part of includes his own body. This use of symbols serves to emphasise that Cage is separated from the adult world but also part of it. The Romantic Child has become a Knowing Child but, inasmuch as the symbols used by Cotes are those of childhood, this is a sexuality that is imposed sympathetically and in parentheses to the child himself. This is a sexuality that is constructed but, because the symbols of that sexuality are portrayed outside Lewis Cotes, is almost not part of the child himself.

In contrast to this sympathetically projected view of childhood is John Everett Millais’s portrait of young girlhood, Cherry Ripe (figure 14). In this picture the girl is caught “before the contamination of adolescence” (Mavor, 1996 p.14) in a way that she reads as “sexualised but not sexual” ( Mavor, 1996 p.42). The girl is dressed in a costume of an oversized bonnet and a white dress with a pink sash and matching pink slippers. The costume covers her body and is something the girl has been passively dressed in. As was noted in the chapter on the Innocent Child, this has the effect of making the girl a ‘child’ to be seen by adults. The dressing up of the girl has transformed the girl into someone subjugated by the adult world. She has become the classic Victorian Innocent Child, a being who has neither a self nor a sexuality that comes from within.

However, Cherry Ripe is intensely sexual in a way that imposes sexuality on the girl from obvious adult perspectives. The title is a sexual invitation (by the artist, not the girl) for a start. The girl is likened to a cherry, ripe for picking - just like the plucked cherries in the basket by her side. The oversized head with its doe-like eyes, pouting lips and red cheeks looks out at us like a child’s doll.


























Figure 14: Cherry Ripe

Beneath the voluminous dress, her legs are open slightly and her hands are held together to form an open vulva shape, with a clitoral thumb at the top. Her hands are wearing black gloves which seem tied, bondage-like, across the palm.
(Higonnet, 1998 p.132). Cherry Ripe then is a picture made by adults for other adults. It portrays concepts of both innocence and sexuality, but these are concepts applied from above, from an adult perspective. Of the Knowing Child portrayed by Mann and others, there is almost nothing.

Apparently the picture is an adult view of childhood, a view that combines the saccharine and the sexual in equal parts. It proposes innocence and then undermines it in a way that would have been entirely understandable in Victorian Britain (Mavor, 1996) where mixed messages and the saying of one thing and doing another were second nature. The cliche of Victorian hypocrisy did not arise out of a vacuum.

Cherry Ripe’s popularity - it sold over 600,000 copies as a magazine centrefold
(Higonnet, 1998 p.51) - is based on the picture’s mix of the sexual and the innocent. Though there is nothing of the Knowing Child about the girl, the sexuality that is imposed on her is one that is not merely subjugated. Her smile, her lips, her cheeks and her open-handed gesture also attribute a receptive pleasure to her sexuality. So, perhaps Millais was acknowledging an essential element of his the girl’s life that goes beyond the accepted the norms of the time and indeed predated Freudian theories of infant sexuality by many years. Like Mavor, he was blasphemous and acknowledged “the sexuality of children and of the Victorian child at that” (Mavor, 1996, p.11).

Garry Gross’s image of Brooke Shields, Sugar and Spice, imposes sexuality on




























Figure 15: By Richard Prince, A Photograph of Brooke Shields by Garry Gross

its subject in a much more exploitative manner. After the picture was taken, the
image was appropriated by Richard Prince who exhibited it as By Richard Prince, A Photograph of Brooke Shields by Garry Gross (figure 15). Prince was taken by the layers of meaning in the photograph and also the court case over ownership of the image between Gross and Brooke Shields’ mother. “Terrie, Brooke Shields' mother recognizes what this picture could possibly suggest, (not about Brooke, but about her). In a word: "pimp". When the picture was taken, Brooke was ten years old but Gary Gross made her head up to look like an older woman. Then he went to the trouble of oiling her body to heighten and refract the presence of her "he-she" adolescence. Now we've got a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it's got a different birthday” ( Prince, 2005).

This imposition of sexuality on Brooke Shields through make-up, oil and lighting is of a completely different nature to that found in Cherry Ripe. It is an exploitative image that sells Shields, or the image of Shields, as a sexual being (though Shields insists she never felt exploited in her early portrayals as a sex symbol (Higonnet, 1998 p.151)). No gap is left for Shields to fill as herself. Instead, as Prince suggests, she has been “pimped” by both her mother and the photographer, as a sexual fantasy figure whose identity has been defined by the crude sexualising symbols of oil and make-up. And while Prince sees her being sold as a two-sexed being, she is actually being sold as a two-aged being - a girl and a woman, both of whom are sexually available (for a price), both of whom have a sexuality that is directed outwards towards the satisfaction of the viewer with no reference to the child’s world or the inner life of Brooke Shields herself.
“Brooke is both her and it at the same time... . And as an it, is in a sense the subject of an impersonal verb that expresses a condition without referring to an agent. The condition that's expressed is an objective resemblance of Brooke that could never be guaranteed in daily life. This is what photographs can do... I felt I was in partnership which the picture.There didn't seem to be any interruption between what was imagined by the picture and what was imagined by me...” (Prince, 2005).

The welding of adult sexuality onto a child’s body, together with the transformation of Shields into a pimped ‘it’, makes Sugar and Spice paedophilic in nature. Another photographer often accused of producing paedophilic images is Charles Dodgson. However, Dodgson’s images do not produce the externally sexualised ‘it’ that Gross’s glamour photography makes, but instead relies on the personality of his young girl subjects themselves.

Dodgson’s most famous photographer is probably his portrait of Alice Liddell (the Alice of Alice in Wonderland) as The Beggar Maid (figure 9). With its connotative title, The Beggar Maid operates in a similar way to Cherry Ripe. Dodgson portrays different visions of childhood and complicates the mix with the title of the photography and his own attitudes to children and social class. The title in itself refers to the myth of Cophetua, a king who only found love when a bare-footed beggar maid came into his court. The Beggar Maid captured the imaginations of Victorian Britain and “reflected a common subject among the Pre-Raphaelite artists and photographers of the time” (Alexander J.,2004). Edward Burne Jones painted it, Julia Margaret Cameron photographed it and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (who describes Dodgson’s picture as “the most beautiful picture ever” (Higonnet, 1998 p.125)) wrote about it in his poem, The Beggar Maid?( Tennyson, 1833).


Her arms across her breast she laid;
She was more fair than words can say:
Bare-footed came the beggar maid
Before the king Cophetua.
In robe and crown the king stept down,
To meet and greet her on her way;
'It is no wonder,' said the lords,
'She is more beautiful than day.'

As shines the moon in clouded skies,
She in her poor attire was seen:
One praised her ankles, one her eyes,
One her dark hair and lovesome mien.
So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been:
Cophetua sware a royal oath:
'This beggar maid shall be my queen!' (Tennyson, 1833)

The poem reinforces the idea of Alice Liddell, the girl who ‘plays’ the Beggar Maid being rendered sexually available through a transformation of her class. It is an idea that can be summed up in the Graham Greene’s idea of The Cophetua Complex (Greene, 2004) - a desire for lower-class women. So Alice is transformed both by her dress, as described in chapter 2, and by reference to the myth of Cophetua, with Dodgson in the role of King Cophetua. Just as in Cherry Ripe, The Beggar Maid has been sexualised by external factors. However, in contrast to Cherry Ripe, these external factors are not transparent symbols of childhood sexuality but personal and cultural references that place Alice Liddell in the space of “difference” that Carol Mavor refers to. This space situates Alice in an imagined world that sits between three opposing poles - the adult/child, the lower class/upper class and the sexual/non-sexual.

The Beggar Maid is constructed, but the question is “Are we seeing the real Alice Liddell, Alice Liddell as Dodgson wanted to project her, or Alice Liddell as she wished to project herself - to us or to the photographer?” (Alexander,2004). The answer is we probably see all three. Alexander notes that Dodgson was adept at capturing his subjects as “a living sentient being, warm, whole, feeling, at one within her own person - far from the wooden figures of “pre-adults found in artistic portraits of the time” (Alexander, 2004). So though we do see the Alice that Dodgson wants to project, we also see an Alice that is at one with herself. Dodgson might be directing us to look at certain elements within the picture through the narratives imbued by costume and the photograph’s title, but at the same time, he is not in total control. Dodgson recognises the power of the young girl and allows her an autonomy to express herself in the photograph. The girl looks out at Dodgson (and us) with a mischievous look that assesses, challenges and plays with our conceptions of what it is to be a child. Dodgson has, like Mann or Dijkstra, created a gap in which Alice Liddell can be herself, the constructed nature of the work notwithstanding. This is a gap that was deliberately created in Dodgson’s working practice where he would chat, play, and tell stories to his young models (Cohen, 1999). As a result he created an atmosphere where the child could be herself. This portrayal of the young girl does not involve an adult imposition of innocence on the child, nor inflicts an adult preconception of what it is to be a child. Rather Alice emanates an idea of what it is to be a child - an idea that is in

























Figure 16: Reverend Thomas Childe Barker and his daughter, May

conflict with many of the Victorian assumptions of what middle-class childhood should be - intelligent, perceptive, socially and physically self-aware. Dodgson’s unorthodox vision of childhood can also be seen in other photographs. In Dodgson’s portraits of Reverend Thomas Childe Barker and his daughter, May (figure 16), the traditional Victorian father sits on a bench and is dominated by his young daughter who looks down on him from above. The girl is the master in this image and her father the helpless servant. The patriarchal order of Victorian Britain has been overturned by Dodgson in much the same way that the Innocent Child is undermined in The Beggar Maid, both by Dodgson and by Alice herself.

If Dodgson allows his subjects into his photographs, Wendy Ewald actively encourages children to reveal themself through photography. While working on her first extended project in the Appalachian Mountains, she decided “to make a document of my new community, but the camera seemed to get in the way” (Ewald, 2000 p.7). Weinberg notes that Ewald believed “she might better manage her project by removing herself as the exclusive author and providing her students with tools and skills to document their own lives” (Ewald, 2000 p.7). The purpose of this was not just to provide children with the ability to shoot, develop and print film but also to challenge the divisions between “art and documentary photography, between photographer and subject, child and adult” (Ewald, 2000 p.8).

Ewald began this process when she gave cameras to children in isolated communities in North America and taught them to capture the harsh realities of their daily lives from their own perspective. However, in her challenge to the “hierarchical and exclusively adult vision of our common humanity” (Ewald, 2000 p.17) Ewald had to learn what the children were seeing and so reinterprate her own vision of the child’s world from their perspective.

In Allen Shepherd’s I dreamt I killed my best friend, Ricky Dixon (figure 17) we see Ricky Dixon lying dead in the forked trunk of a tree. His arms are
outstretched, his mouth open wide and his eyes closed. The photograph is a visualisation of Shepherd’s dream and an example of how Ewald brings children’s unconscious into photography through use of dreams and fantasies and also root that unconscious in the reality of the social, psychological and cultural environments they inhabit. Allen Shepherd’s image emerges from a fight (and a subsequent dream) he had with Ricky Dixon, while race, religion, family and death are themes that recur in Ewald’s projects across the world.

























Figure 17: I dreamt I killed my best friend, Ricky Dixon

As Weinberg says, the “sometimes menacing images produced by Ewald and her students” (Ewald, 2000 p.7) show us that we can’t assume there are experiences children do not know about. By showing us the extent of children’s understanding and their unconscious world, Weinberg believes Ewald is set apart from other photographers, like Hine, Mann and Levitt, who show images of children directed at grown-up sensibilities.

However, though some of Mann’s work is directed at adult sensibilities
- Popsicle Drips with its referencing of Edward Weston’s Neil compositions is a good example (Higonnet, 1998 p.136) - it also reveals children’s sensibilities. An image like New Mothers emerges out of her children’s games and is reflective of the sensibilites that played those games. Ewald projects adult concepts of what is important onto her children and encourages children “to explore their dreams and fantasies as well as the day-to-dayness of their sometimes troubled existence” (Ewald, 2000 p.8) She places a value on the unconscious which directs an adult sensibility onto the children she works with. Similarly, when the children produce work, she also has to teach them that their roughly made pictures are good (Ewald, 2000 p.37), and possibly also that black and white polaroids are good. Ewald doesn’t construct the pictures themselves, but she does construct a framework of values that direct children’s work towards adult sensibilities in both the content and form of the images produced. Within this framework, she leaves space for the children to project their world-view onto the pictures. Though the pictures have been shaped by Ewald in some ways, Ewald’s own vision of childhood has been shaped by the children she has worked with (Ewald, 2000 p.8). So though there is an adult perspective involved, the pictures Ewald’s children produce show us authentic perspectives that portray childhoods which are rooted in the complex environments they inhabit. The children do not show themselves as Romantic, Innocent or Knowing but rather as individuals existing in worlds where the worlds of the child and the adult interact and overlap. Ewald breaks down the boundaries between adult and child to reveal childhood as part of a process where all adults were once children and all children ( if death, a common theme in Ewald’s work, does not interrupt) will become adults. Children are, as in the pre-romantic era, mini-adults, but adults are also maxi-children.

Where does Emily of The Rose Garden stand in relation to these conflicting views of childhood? The construction of Loretta Lux does bring in the child’s perspective of childhood, but it is very different to that allowed by Ewald, Dodgson or Mann. At the same time, however, it also shares some common themes. Where Ewald frames her children’s pictures through ideas (the idea of the unconscious, the religious and the dreamworld) that she accentuates through her workshops, Lux visually creates that framework through her digital imposition of psychologically loaded landscapes onto her pictures. Ewald gives her children the freedom to choose their landscape, Lux projects it onto her children. However, this projection of landscape onto the child is not something arbitrary, nor is it something pre-determined. The landscape is chosen in response to the child and the pose and gaze they come up with in their studio session.

The pose the child comes up with is something that is to a large extent determined by Lux. She tries to direct the children into particular poses that she can use later with separate looks. However, the gaze of the child is largely undetermined by Lux. Instead the child, though directed where to look or how wide to open her/his eyes, is not told how to look. The look, as was noted in the previous chapter, emerges as the session progresses and the child draws into himself/herself through boredom or bafflement. The look is one that reflects the internal world of the child - because that is the space that Lux photographs. By not engaging with Emily, Lux reveals aspects of Emily in exactly the same way that Dodgson reveals aspects of Alice Liddell by engaging with her. Lux photographs a child turned in on herself, Dodgson photographs Alice turned out on the world (with Dodgson acting as a medium through which Alice can project herself).

As Jane Fletcher points out, many writers and critics have compared Lux’s work to that of Dodgson (Fletcher, 2006), though Fletcher herself believes Lux’s photographs are “more pertinent to the original illustrations of ‘Alice’ by John Tenniel...” where Alice’s features are stretched and shrunk (Fletcher, 2006 p.4) in a similar way to the alterations Lux makes to the dimensions of her subjects through digital manipulation. “Boy or girl, the head is too big for the body, the eyes are too big for the face” (Fletcher 2006 p.4). However, in The Rose Garden (and other Lux images ) though the head is too big for the body - it has been pasted in from a separate image after all - the eyes are not too big for the body. Photographed at a wider angle than the body, the eyes do seem to stick out, giving rise to the widespread characterisation of Lux’s work as “bug-eyed children” (Pantall, 2006), but this is possibly due to the tricks of perspective made by having a larger head shot on a wider angle than the body and background - a trick of perspective that helps create the “grim and ambiguous” feeling of the German world of fairy tales (Fletcher, 2006 p.4).

Instead of merely creating bug-eyed children, Lux photographs a space that, through the child’s eyes, draws us into the child’s world. Lux then uses either a previously prepared background, or creates a new one, for the child to inhabit (Fletcher, 2006 p.4). This background/landscape then brings out certain elements of the child and their childhood as revealed by the child/imagined by the viewer in their gaze. Of course Lux determines what we see and where we look and, with her background in art, she exploits the art historical to reference concepts of childhood that include the child as a mini-adult, the Innocent Child and the Knowing Child.

Sexual meaning may be added to the picture either deliberately or unconsciously. As we have seen, in the Rose Garden, the fecundity of the garden, the creeping nature of the rose tendrils and the open doorways of the walled space reference the girl’s burgeoning and barely concealed sexuality. However, this sexuality is something that lies external to Emily. Her sexuality is externalised in the same way in which Lewis Cage’s is externalised, although the symbolism of the Young Cricketer is more transparent.

Though the look is very different, Lux’s work is close to Mann’s in terms of working practice. Where Mann responds to her children’s games and movement around her West Virginia farm (Woolcock, 1992) and builds an image around those by restaging the game or activity, Lux responds to her children’s gazes and poses and builds a framework of meaning around those. Both use control in their image but provide a space for their children to inhabit, and for both of these photographers that space is provided by ennui at the photographic process. The nature of this ennui is different for due to the different relationships Mann and Lux have with their subjects. The ennui of Mann’s children is more intimate and has an ease of movement and expression about it that engages the children with the world around them and the games and activities they are supposed to be playing. The ennui of Lux’s children is less familiar and with the sparseness of the surroundings they are photographed in and the lack of a relationship with Lux herself, the space the children move into is an internal one.