In contrast to the usual roly-poly photographs of babies, Debora Hunter`s ”baby pictures” have a darker, offbeat quality. They ask serious questions about childrearing by posing the innocent babies in the environments of their unseen parents.
The settings range from a high-rise apartment with a spectacular view of the Chicago lakefront or a bedroom with a built-in Postmodern children`s playhouse to more modest middle-class accommodations.
”The environment will be the baby`s visual memories,” says Hunter, who grew up in Oak Park and now teaches at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. ”We`re schooled in Freud and are used to thinking about a child`s psychological relationship with parents, but we usually don`t think about the environment so much. The environment expresses the social class, certainly, of the parents and also, in subtle ways, the values of the parents through the aesthetics of the house.”
Hunter`s provocative portraits of Chicago babies are part of a two-person show, ”Sitting Pretty: Photographs by Debora Hunter and Sue Packer,” that opened yesterday and will run through Jan. 3, 1993, in the Art Institute of Chicago`s Photography Galleries.
”I ask questions but I don`t posit any answers,” Hunter says.
”Children are born into all kinds of environments, and they all work their magic. Children are resilient, and it all makes for a wonderful mix.”
