Enfants horribles

My husband Alan Rapp just sent me a link to an upcoming exhibition at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, featuring the work of Tierney Gearon. According to the announcement:

The subject of The Mother Project is the interaction between the artist, her mother and her own children. The photographs are personal studies of her family, yet raise larger issues of aging, mental illness, and the complicated dynamic of the mother-child relationship.

Gearon is not the only photographer whose work exploring the darker side of family life and childhood has caught my eye. As one who has tried and failed many times to map the commonly accepted visions of childhood-as-Eden upon my own blunt, ugly memories of youth, I have also been drawn to the work of painter Gottfried Helnwein, whose violent, grotesque paintings of children strike me as exaggerations in the service of an uncomfortable truth: childhood is a precarious, vulnerable, and often brutal time.

Helnwein manages to capture both the fantasy of children, what we want them to be -- beautiful, pure, and soft --— as well as the fragility that renders them vulnerable and helpless. (Particularly disturbing are Helnwein's depictions of babies being presented patriotically to Nazis.) His children are dark fantasies. The painterly gestures in these portraits grant the children a compassionate gloss of perfection and distance, even as the stark realism (more in some paintings and less in others) renders them (and us) inseparable from the horror that grips them by the throat.

In photographer Jill Greenberg's controversial series "End Times," which my husband recently reviewed for photo-eye Booklist, she captures the raw anguish of young children. Each portrait gives us a wailing child shot against a simple background and cast in an ethereal light, an approach that has the effect of isolating the sheer torment and sorrow that, however fleeting, is being felt by the child.

Like Helnwein, Greenberg is creating an exaggeration in the service of the truth, which for her is political. Each of the portraits is accompanied by phrases that will be familiar to anyone who's followed politics over the past six years: "Rapture Index," "Shock," "Awe," "Torture," "Spin," and "Nucular (sic)" are a few. Still I'm tempted to say the evening news tie-in trivializes the work, ties it too closely to the present and not with the larger, existential questions.

As Alan wrote in his critique:

For my taste, the titles play too simplistically, detracting from what could otherwise be disturbing yet enigmatic imagery. The best pronouncements against such overwhelming power have to employ more subtlety than their targets do. In using an explicitly political context for these anxious portraits, Greenberg may have inadvertently set the critique to round on her: if these children represent our helpless society in an oppressive environment, then some authoritarian fearmonger in either case is causing the distress. "Manipulator," meet "the Decider"; you may have found more in common than you wished.

The children photographed by Loretta Lux, on the other hand, are eerily blank, scrubbed of flaws, and removed from their setting/context, save for a few set pieces. Here, too, we see the painterly touches --— light, color, shadows all exaggerated in the service of the message. And what is that message? In giving us what we want --— perfect children, perfect childhood -- Lux reveals the inherent contradiction with that desire. Perfection is inhuman and therefore repulsive.

I suspect most will dismiss these portraits of children as "disturbing," at best. But for me, I find them oddly comforting. I spent much of my adult life comparing the predominant societal fantasy of childhood as a carefree, happy time with the reality that my own early years were full of violence, lies, and hardship. By presenting us with the brutal realities of childhood in a beautiful way, these portraits embody that schism. In them I catch a glimpse of my own truth.