Why do we, most of us, now feel a sense of unease when looking at photographs of children who are not related or close to us?
Of course we will admire the baby pictures, & formal portraits or school photos are probably ok, as are photos of the school play or formal occasions. But a picture, snatched or posed, of just a single child?
We used to be able to look at such pictures & see nothing but innocence, no matter what the pose or degree of déshabille, no matter how challengingly the child was gazing back at us.
We even bore, after a fashion, the excruciating embarrassment of the moment when the photo album came out & your parents showed the new boy or girlfriend your first picture – the one of a smiling chubby baby lying naked on a rug – sometimes passed off as revenge for the heartache your teenage tantrums had created.
Victorian photographs can seem especially troubling; never mind Lewis Carroll, Julia Cameron’s child models can look disturbingly louche & ambiguous to our no longer innocent eyes. And yet, unless the Victorians were being deliberately complicit, leaving things left unsaid, their attitude to children was nothing like the fabled ‘seen & not heard’, at least not all the time. Trollope is very good at children, & Janet Ross speaks of how Lord Macaulay used to converse with her when they ere out walking together as if she were as well read & intelligent as he.
More modern writers, such as Mary Wesley in Camomile Lawn show the complicity of heads turned away & things left unexplained to children who were subject to abuse. It would have been socially embarrassing to do more than keep a watchful eye on someone – somebody’s husband, somebody’s father - someone like us, someone with predilections. But we do not have to discuss it or tell the children.
Now we can no longer just do & hope for the best – we know.
The photographed gaze of a child can now have the same disturbing & unsettling effect as that of one of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. It says, We know who you are, what you get up to.
And we feel guilty, regardless.
Links
Julia Margaret Cameron
Janet Ross: Early Days Recalled
Mary Wesley: Camomile Lawn
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
