The Lux Effect - Conclusion: Real and Imaginary

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

The Rose Garden is a constructed picture that is composed of several different elements. Landscape, dress, the look and pose all contribute to the power of the image, and these elements reinforce each other through their digitally manipulated juxtaposition.

Lux’s use of landscape references Romantic visions of childhood where the child is portrayed as a privileged part of nature. At the same time, her use of landscape sexualises Emily and draws a distinction between the world of the child and that of the adult. Emily’s costume references the Innocent Child of Victorian England as well as Lux’s own childhood, but again sexualises the girl and blurs the distinction between adult and child. The blankness of gaze and awkward pose also create a contradictory message which draws us into Emily’s world while at the same time placing her in the world created for her by Lux.

With all these elements in place, the original question of whether The Rose Garden is real or imaginary needs to be asked once again. The Rose Garden is both real and imaginary. As we saw in the previous chapter, the way Lux constructs her pictures around the gaze of the child after the fact shows there is a direct relationship with the child’s world. We, like Lux before us, are drawn into the child’s world through her gaze and through the elements of this world that are accentuated by Lux.

It is worth looking at similar images, examples of what Cowgill calls “the Lux Effect” (Cowgill, 2004), that try to do the same thing as Lux but fail to incorporate this reality principle. The work of Achim Lippoth, Julia Blackmon and Simen Johan are examples of this. Like Lux, Johan manipulates different elements of landscape, dress, look and light to create a striking image where the child is the centre. His Untitled 35 from his Evidence of Things Unseen series shows a girl dressed in a fur hat and clutching a plastic camera (figure 18). It is snowing and she is standing outside a law office. However the picture does not engage with the child and, instead of referencing the child’s world, Johan creates an otherworldly atmosphere where night, snow, costume, camera, background, weird lighting and weirder eyes conjure up an image that is more alien than childlike. It is an interesting image but it is entirely imaginary. The girl is, like Gross’s picture of Brooke Shields, both “her and it” (Prince, 2005) at the same time - and the “it” is an alien “it” not a human or child “it”. And though Johan claims his pictures have an emotional depth (Aperture, 2003), any emotion that is expressed by the girl is overwhelmed by the melodramatic and intrusive nature of his constructions.

























Figure 18: Untitled 35

Lux in contrast fuses the real and imaginary in a way that undermines the false dichotomy between the two. The real is made up of the imaginary and the imaginary has elements of the real. Religion and the history of art is built on this premise, as are pychoanalytic theories of dreams, the Uncanny and the unconscious (Freud, 2006). Even highly real things like the invasion of Iraq resulted from a confusion between real and imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The imagined conflict between the real and imaginary is something that Lux uses to full effect in her pictures. She understands that two apparently opposing elements can sit together in a picture and simultaneously reinforce and undermine each other. When we see that Emily shows signs of being both an Innocent Child and a Knowing Child, the picture presents a puzzle to us. We want a simple answer where black is black and white is white. However, as Fletcher (and Cixous before her) points out things aren’t that simple either in photography or life (Fletcher, 1998) - there are shades of grey and this is where Emily sits, happily straddling the middle ground between the overlapping categories of Innocent/Knowing, Child/Adult and Asexual/Sexual being. It is a strategy repeatedly used in photography and art, especially where the representation of children is concerned. Francis Cotes did it with Lewis Cage, presenting him as an child in an externally sexualised body, Dodgson does the same in The Beggar Maid where Alice Liddell is transformed by title, costume and look to become the ultimate Upper Class/Working Class, Unavailable/Available, Pure/Sullied, Innocent/Knowing Child. The most direct example of this portrayal of contradictory elements is Rineke Dijkstra’s Hilton Head portrait where the girl in the apricot bikini is portrayed on the cusp of two worlds and, most interestingly, is shown knowing she is on the cusp of two worlds.

The Rose Garden is both real and imaginary. It exploits the false (imaginary) division between the Innocent and the Knowing child and the associated dichotomies mentioned above, divisions that are typical of the binary thought that Cixous believes typifies Western cultural thought (Cixous, 1996). Lux befuddles us by forcing us to make choices between values that linguistically and culturally seem to be opposed, but in both the real worlds which children inhabit and the imaginary worlds of their (and our) unconscious are not opposed at all.

This juxtaposition of values is aided by digital manipulation - the placing of Emily against the garden background brings out elements of the romantic, the sexual and creates both divisions and connections between the worlds of the adult and the child. This manipulation doesn’t compromise the authenticity of the image though or childhood world that Emily inhabits. In a sentiment that predated postmodernism by around 100 years, Oscar Wilde said that “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter” (Wilde, 2006). A similar thing could be said about photography where the more skilful the photographer, the more manipulated the image becomes and the less is left to chance or the whimsy of the sitter. However, despite the manipulated composition, costume and pose, Lux does leave things outside her control. Like Dodgson, Dijkstra and Mann, she leaves a gap for her subject, Emily to fill. The image has been manipulated, but Emily hasn’t. The Rose Garden is both beautiful and disturbing, a picture that combines the real and imaginary and presents a vision of a childhood we all once inhabited and we all still inhabit, a vision of childhood that is as real and imaginary as it gets.









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