Encapsulating Childhood

I have had an interesting week regarding my photography despite not picking up the camera. I was invited by the Shpilman Institute for Photography to write a piece about my latest series "Stillness in Time" which you can read here, entitled "Encapsulating Stillness". It's good to sit and write about your work, one of the reasons I love to blog. It makes you think about why you are doing it, rather than just doing it because you like to do it. It's about digging deeper and exploring what drives you to do it and to go beyond a more conscious level of your work.

So, the first thing I addressed was why I wanted to photograph children using the wet plate collodion process. I have mentioned it before on my blog, and you can read about it on the "SIP" blog so I won't go into it here.

I then was asked the question on FB whether the pictures of these children are really a depiction of my childhood - this was also asked by a childhood friend who knew me well. And to a point the answer is yes.

This brings me on to the next interesting part of my week. A couple of days I posted this portrait of my son (I won't say where) and the reaction wasn't very positive. They found it uncomfortable, distressing, depressing, words such a 'postmortem' was used - to 'I really don't like this'. Which of course is fine. On the other hand people found it beautiful, serene and peaceful - it is amazing how one projects something of themselves to an image. This pleases me. For me I want to leave an image open.

However, it wasn't the criticism that perturbed me but the fact that people still find it difficult to cope with images of childhood or children that are not smiling or happy. I have been rereading Anne Higonnet's "Pictures of Innocence. The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood" which I always find interesting, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not. Nonetheless, in regards to my own work I thought that I am not depicting the child, what I am doing is challenging the notion of childhood being innocent - not the child. We shouldn't sentimentalize childhood, to do this would be a grave disservice to our children. It would be a lie. It would suggest that a child lives in a blissful bubble and doesn't feel things that we do as adults. Children are acutely aware of what is going on around them. They feel the emotional torment of a parent's violent argument, they feel the sense of isolation in a classroom if they don't fit in. They know the pain of being laughed at by peers. Children feel as vulnerable, if not more vulnerable than adults. I am not saying that all of childhood is like this. I remember lots of fun and happiness and I see this in my own children. But childhood is what shapes us into the adults we become. It is a small but deeply significant part of our lives. If you see something in a picture it may say something of ourselves - we project our feelings. So we can look at these images and see serenity or fear but that is up to the individual. But we must allow children & childhood to be explored, to be heard literally and visually and sometimes this may make us uncomfortable.