Children as artists' models
I was wandering around in Google images this morning, looking for photos of Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe, and of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe by Gerard Malanga, and came across some Mapplethorpes I had never seen before. He turns out to have taken some pictures that disturb me -- and I'm not talking about the famous self-portrait with bullwhip, which doesn't disturb me at all, although I don't think much of it as a work of art. No, these pictures are disturbing because they're pictures of children.
I'm not going to link to them -- you can find them on the web easily enough, if you want to look for yourself -- but I will describe them. One is of a little boy, nude, sitting atop the back of a big plush armchair. The second is a nude of a child of indeterminate sex, seen from the back . The third, and most disturbing, is of a little girl wearing a dress, sitting on a stone bench. Her dress is pulled up to expose part of her naked vulva. She is staring at the camera with that sort of glazed expression little kids get when they don't really know what is going on.
What the hell is going on in these pictures, and why do they bother me? Sexualized images of children bother me a lot, but these aren't exactly sexual. I don't know what they are. The one of the little boy is the least troubling, I think because I've hung out with little kids enough to be able to imagine a kid who is so eager to climb on the back of a chair that he isn't willing to stop and get dressed first. But I'm not exactly thrilled with it either. The rear view of the kid is like an arty version of something you would see in an Ivory Snow commercial, and so I have to think about why other bare-assed pictures of little kids don't bother me if this one does. The third one -- the third one feels very wrong. It doesn't seem at all like something a kid would come up with on her own. She's not having a diaper changed, or getting un/dressed. She's not playing. She's doing something an adult has told her to do.
Mapplethorpe created a lot of transgressive images, but the ones of adults are, I assume, of people who knew what they were getting themselves into -- and they aren't of anything he wouldn't have done himself, as far as I can tell. But kids -- what is up with these kids' parents? Who thinks, oh sure, I'll let Robert Mapplethorpe take a picture of my daughter's vulva, that sounds like a great idea? These kids are adults now -- how do they feel about these images being out there, beyond their control?
I suppose this raises the question of whether you should ever take a picture of a naked kid, or of a kid at all. There are plenty of baby pictures of me where I'm not wearing a shirt, and a few of my boy cousins where they're completely naked. Was it wrong to take those pictures? They certainly weren't made with any kind of sexual intent, and they aren't widely distributed, unlike the Mapplethorpe photos -- but was it wrong, anyway? We act like the bodies of children belong to their parents -- within some significant limits. Should those limits be different from what they are?
I'm not going to link to them -- you can find them on the web easily enough, if you want to look for yourself -- but I will describe them. One is of a little boy, nude, sitting atop the back of a big plush armchair. The second is a nude of a child of indeterminate sex, seen from the back . The third, and most disturbing, is of a little girl wearing a dress, sitting on a stone bench. Her dress is pulled up to expose part of her naked vulva. She is staring at the camera with that sort of glazed expression little kids get when they don't really know what is going on.
What the hell is going on in these pictures, and why do they bother me? Sexualized images of children bother me a lot, but these aren't exactly sexual. I don't know what they are. The one of the little boy is the least troubling, I think because I've hung out with little kids enough to be able to imagine a kid who is so eager to climb on the back of a chair that he isn't willing to stop and get dressed first. But I'm not exactly thrilled with it either. The rear view of the kid is like an arty version of something you would see in an Ivory Snow commercial, and so I have to think about why other bare-assed pictures of little kids don't bother me if this one does. The third one -- the third one feels very wrong. It doesn't seem at all like something a kid would come up with on her own. She's not having a diaper changed, or getting un/dressed. She's not playing. She's doing something an adult has told her to do.
Mapplethorpe created a lot of transgressive images, but the ones of adults are, I assume, of people who knew what they were getting themselves into -- and they aren't of anything he wouldn't have done himself, as far as I can tell. But kids -- what is up with these kids' parents? Who thinks, oh sure, I'll let Robert Mapplethorpe take a picture of my daughter's vulva, that sounds like a great idea? These kids are adults now -- how do they feel about these images being out there, beyond their control?
I suppose this raises the question of whether you should ever take a picture of a naked kid, or of a kid at all. There are plenty of baby pictures of me where I'm not wearing a shirt, and a few of my boy cousins where they're completely naked. Was it wrong to take those pictures? They certainly weren't made with any kind of sexual intent, and they aren't widely distributed, unlike the Mapplethorpe photos -- but was it wrong, anyway? We act like the bodies of children belong to their parents -- within some significant limits. Should those limits be different from what they are?