Certain themes seemed natural to photography from its inception. At the time, high mortality in an industrial society beset by financial slumps and endemic disease meant that people lived with death; and the photographing of children readily became an emotional necessity. The urge to trace children through photography is at its most desperate in post-mortem photography. This need to keep memory as something tangible or visible may be seen in the deeply poignant picture by August Sander in 1911, My Wife in Joy and Sorrow, in which she holds her twins in christening robes, one alive and one clearly dead and physically withdrawing.
Photography notably encouraged the visual presentation of children as individuals. In 19th-century photographic studios, they were presented as the focus of their parents' pride and affection. But even in their best clothes and on their stilted best behaviour, children achieved a difference. The strange culture of backdrops and studio properties that flourished in the mid-Victorian period transplanted sitters into unreal, grand, or picturesque settings, bringing the outdoors indoors—often starting a wood at the edge of a carpet—and was promoted by the visually innocent photographer; for whom the possession of such items as a classical balustrade assured his clients of dignity and distinction. The miniature clarity of the albumen print imparted a doll's-house surrealism to adults, perched on wooden stiles or posed in painted libraries, but accepting the bizarre in the name of fashion. Willing children could effect the necessary transformation through their own curious interest. The particular adult concentration on the child, found in the 19th-century studio, was exemplified in later practice by Marcus Adams (1875-1959), who took tens of thousands of child portraits in his children's studio in London from 1926—including the young members of the royal family. But while 19th-century photographers planted the child into an adult world, Adams constructed a nursery. His camera sat on the toy shelf; his pictures are of children responding to the distractions of ‘a trick banana, cuddly toys, lumps of glass and mechanical gadgets’.
Two notable 19th-century photographers took an immensely affectionate interest in their subjects, but approached them from radically different directions. Charles Dodgson's photographs have a textual counterpart in his writing for children. He wrote as an adult who listened to children, experiencing the pleasures of common sense at war with logic, mixed with an opposite, irrational dream world. His sitters were encouraged to play, to break the mould of adult pride in good behaviour by lolling, to remove the constrictions and ugliness of modern clothes by posing in nightgowns, in fancy dress, or naked. Julia Margaret Cameron's intense, even monumental vision of infancy derived from a passionate combination of her experience of motherhood and an enthusiasm for the religious painting of the Renaissance. She accepted the challenge of fine art to express an ideal of infancy and innocence through actual children.
The social presence of children, playing or working in the street, was initially one of photography's greatest hazards. Children tend to regard any event as entertainment and this, coupled with the inconvenient resemblance of the camera to the itinerant's peepshow, meant a constant clustering of interest in front of a photographer. Paul Martin, working in London in the 1890s, who wanted to take children with a degree of naturalness in the street, ironically (in his memoir, Victorian Snapshots) praised the ‘facile’ hand camera thus: ‘It is impossible to describe the thrill which taking the first snap without being noticed gave one, and the relief at not being followed about by urchins, who just as one is going to take a photograph, stand right in front shouting, “Take me, guv'nor!” ’ This problem is now a global one. Sebastiao Salgado, taking photographs for his book Migrations (2000), managed to clear the way to his real subject through swarms of children by saying: ‘I'm going to sit here. If you want me to take a picture of you, line up and I'll take a picture of you. Then you go away and play.’ This formality unexpectedly generated a second expressive work, The Children: Refugees and Migrants (2000).
The formal engagement with street children was both social and picturesque in its drive. D. O. Hill and Robert Adamson's Newhaven pictures show the children of an admirable society. John Thomson's The Street Life of London (1876-7), focuses on the character and problems of individuals, like The Independent Shoe Black (1877). Such social questioning, designed to effect reform, is exemplified in the later 19th century by Jacob Riis's journalistic work in the New York slums. Finding that words did not achieve their end, he used the shock of photography and achieved reform. In 1904, the National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Hine to make an often covert photographic demonstration of the exploitation of children, throughout the USA. The director of the committee later referred to Hine as the first to offer ‘emotional’ rather than intellectual recognition of social problems. The sense of deprived children as both innocent victims and symbols of hope for the future runs as a natural thread through 20th-century documentary photography—in, for example, Bert Hardy's series on the Glasgow Gorbals for Picture Post (1958).
By the late 20th century, street life had almost died out in Western culture—killed by traffic and other dangers. Roger Mayne's street photographs, principally taken in Southam Street in London in the 1950s, show a life formed by the streets themselves: ‘the lack of all logic that gives effects beyond the imagination of a town planner.’ His response, like Hine's, was emotional or intuitive; he became involved: ‘an artist is a kind of person who is deeply interested in people, and the forces that work in our society. This implies a humanist art, but not necessarily an interest in “politics”.’
While the camera was an expensive tool, it rarely fell into the hands of children. Jacques-Henri Lartigue was a privileged child in a rich and inventive family. He offered us a new expectation of photography, seen from the child's perspective. The unthreatening character of a child ‘playing’ with the camera revealed and encouraged the playful loopiness of the adult world around him. Such child use of the camera is increasingly regarded as empowering children to present and explain themselves and their society. Wendy Ewald (b. 1951) circles around the problems and the charms of education and creativity by working with children. Part of her concern is for unreality (in adult terms), an invitation to children to stage or act out their dreams and fantasies for the camera. In Secret Games she writes: ‘To ask the children themselves to participate in exploring their world is to acknowledge that it is their experience, and that rather than being made to “mind their place, ” children might be helped to find ways of illuminating and sharing their inner lives.’
In the 20th century, the gaze itself has become a guilty act, and child photography a potential crime. Where the Victorians saw the attractions of innocence, we see through a Freudian consciousness of adult guilt. Debate on the concerns raised by the exploitation of children has crystallized around the photography of Sally Mann. She, like Cameron, has confused our modern critical sense by introducing a studied formality to the act of photography, using a plate camera and making reference to earlier works. She is a mother and worked with her own children, which gave her intimate access and also the authority to direct or encourage. She made a consciously public art from close personal experience. In mixing her sense of beauty with a reading of the darker and more confused side of childhood experience, she offered a troubling vision to the public world she was addressing.
Fritz Ballin: Gerda Ballin in party costume, Munich, c. 1922
— Sara F. Stevenson
Bibliography
- Life Library of Photography: Photographing Children (1971).
- George, A. R., Heyman, A., and Hoffman, E. (eds.), Flesh & Blood: Photographers' Images of their Own Families (1992).
- Goldberg, V., Lewis Hine: Children at Work (1999).
- Ewald, W., Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children, 1969-1999 (2000).
- Brown, M. R. (ed.), Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud (2002)
