On Photographing Children and Meeting Students Halfway.

My colleague Almae Larson and I were sitting around the lunch table a few semesters ago when she mentioned that someday she would really like to put together a slide presentation of photographers who make images of children. It was frustrating to her that students gravitated toward images of babies in pea pods or tended to only photograph children who were doing cute, sweet things.

Feeling adventurous, I took her up on the challenge, and got on ArtStor and put a little something together, with the following artists:

August Sander
Wynn Bullock
Harry Callahan
Julia Margaret Cameron
Lewis Carroll
Emmet Gowin
Gertrude Kasebier
Lewis Hine
Jacques Lartigue
Sally Mann
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
W. Eugene Smith, and here
Anonymous 19th Century Daguerreotypes of Sleeping Babies.

If you know anything about the photographers on the list (or you take the time to look through the links), you will see that there is some challenging work in there.

The statistics that my university system gives us, as faculty, is that something like sixty percent of our students are working mothers who are trying to improve their job situation, and thus, are back at school. That number is not always born out in my classes, but on the day I showed the images to my class, I would bet more than a third of the students had children of their own.

Again, if you know the photographers on the list, you can probably imaging the top-of-my head narrative I was giving: “This guy photographed Germans and had to run from the Nazis, this girl is Alice from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and the images weren’t so creepy in the 19th Century, this woman photographed her children and her books were banned as obscene, this guy was a well-to-do young french child who had a darkroom and camera when he was very young, this girl was exposed to mercury and suffered her entire life...” You can imagine the silence in the room when we got to the Daguerreotypes at the end of the list.

In the following days, I stopped to consider the absurdity of showing these images to students who really were expecting something much warmer and sweeter. I had tried to show photographers who were significant names in the history of photography (which is part of my job given that the course satisfies an arts elective). However, if you step out of your preconceptions of photo-history, the images are pretty horrific.

I think that those of us with children tend to filter a lot of what we see through our experience as parents. When I was twenty-five, I found sleeping baby images to be fascinating. Now that I have taken three a.m. trips to the emergency room with a colicky infant, I tend to see my own child laying in the images. And understand the heartbreak those 19th century parents must have felt.

I can also understand why my students were put off by the images.

Isn’t there a way to meet them halfway? To let them voice their love of pea-pod babies and still talk about Sally Mann? Is getting them to improve their own images of their children enough? It is, after all, why a lot of them are taking the class. Where do we find the balance between the images we devoured as graduate students, and the images our students are ready to see?

By the way, I regularly show a clip on YouTube from a PBS documentary about Jacob Riis. I know the voice of the narrator, but can never remember his name. At any rate, toward the end of the clip is a segment about infant mortality in New York at the turn of the century, with a description of mothers walking the streets at night holding children dieing of dysentery or T.B. I tear up a little in class when I show it now. Again, you always filter it through your own experience. Plus, the video has a sound glitch right at that point, which makes the whole room jump out of their seats. You can't embed the video, but it is here.