Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (Interplay)

Pictures of Innocence--with l00 illustrations that range from Caravaggio's raunchy Cupid to Edward Weston's luminous, analytical nude studies of his son Neil to anonymous family Christmas-card snapshots--is the kickoff title in what is billed as "a new series of books about controversial themes and issues in the arts that cut across traditional disciplines." Higonnet marshals masses of material to develop her argument that the way we look at children and childhood is changing, and that this change affects our judgment of art, freedom of expression, sexuality, privacy, consent, exploitation, and child abuse.

"Pictures of children are at once the most common, the most sacred, and the most controversial images of our time," Higonnet writes in her introduction. Her concerns are not confined to the most obvious ones. In chapter 1, "The Romantic Child," Higonnet writes, "The image of the Romantic child replaces what we have lost, or what we fear to lose. Every sweetly sunny, innocently cute Romantic child image stows away a dark side: a threat of loss, of change, and, ultimately, of death."

In "Photographs Against the Law," Higonnet points out that "since the early 1980s, photography has been increasingly implicated in the crime of sexual child abuse." Carefully tracing this thread, she asks at one point, "Why photography? Because photographs can and do document actions." It comes down to the fact that a photograph (in this case, one by Dorothea Lange) "originated in the act of clicking a camera at a real person."

This complex, brilliant book will educate anyone who reads it. In its balanced, minutely detailed discussions of difficult issues, it illuminates issues that have heretofore been swamped in passionate but subjective rhetoric. --Peggy Moorman

Book Description
INTERPLAY: A series that addresses controversial themes and issues in the arts.

The ideal of childhood innocence is perhaps the most cherished concept of modern Western culture, all the more so because it seems to be under siege. Pictures have always been crucial to that ideal, and now they promise to transform it. Pictures of Innocence begins by tracing the visual history of ideal childhood: the pictorial invention of childhood innocence in eighteenth-century portraits, its diffusion in nineteenth-century popular paintings and illustration, and its culmination in today's best-selling and most widely practiced forms of photography. It deals with pictures of many sorts, ranging from eighteenth-century portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds to greeting cards by Anne Geddes, from the controversial photographs of Lewis Carroll to those of Sally Mann. The book then turns to the crisis in the ideal of childhood innocence. Ever since its invention, photography has unsettled the certainties of ideal childhood, not only by revealing its inherent tensions, but also by showing how the uses and interpretations of photography can eroticize children. These increasingly acute difficulties have recently provoked a dramatic reaction in the form of sweeping child pornography laws. At an intersection between the history of ideas, art, popular culture, censorship, and law, Pictures of Innocence shows how we are in the midst of a radical redefinition of childhood itself, a turbulent change in fundamental cultural values inaugurated by images.

However, readers should be aware that the author substantially misstates the law in several places. She cites some interpretive dicta from a district court case in California (US v. Dost) as being the actual text of the federal law. The federal law isn't nearly as vague as she suggests. Moreover she says that the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1995 criminalized depictions of breasts and buttocks of minors. Untrue. The final bill passed deleted these provisions. These are serious omissions to a sensitive discussion.

Lawrence A. Stanley, Esq. NY, NY