America’s Children: Picturing Childhood From Early America to the Present
Edited by Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin
Norton, 301 pages, $39.95
We forget sometimes that words and images are but half-steps toward the truth–that anything that has been given language or ink has been taken out of context and transformed. Evidence is ever only essence. History is an estimate.
Still, words and photographs operate as passports to the past and to ourselves, and where there is no record we feel its absence. In their new book, “America’s Children: Picturing Childhood From Early America to the Present,” authors Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin suggest that one of the most grievous deficiencies in the chronicle of American life concerns the paucity of images that depict the real lives of children.
“The relative absence of children from our visual history is apparent in works of history and in books on the history of photography,” the authors assert. They cite, as one example, the Smithsonian publication “American Photographs: The First Century,” in which, they say, just over a dozen photographs of children are included in a collection of some 180 photos. Worse, say Thompson and Mac Austin, where images of children do exist, they either present their subjects in a sentimental way, as so-called “valentines to innocence” (think of the work of Anne Geddes) or as victims in need of political or social rescue (the work of Jacob Riis and Dorothea Lange being the most forceful entries in this category).
Who, then, are the children who grew up to become the men and women of this country? How can we know how they felt, what they were thinking, what sorts of dreams they entertained? Can we reconstruct a meaningful approximation of our past if we go on ignoring the children, and if we do not understand who children have been, how can we parent for the future?
Such provocative questions filter through the mind as one studies the photographs and words in Thompson and Mac Austin’s book. Arranged in neat if sometimes frustratingly open-ended categories–“Children in Family Life,” “Children and Their Families on the Move,” “Children and Their Community,” “Children at Work,” etc.–the images and language fragments beckon and unnerve. Above all else, they underscore one of the authors’ most persistent arguments–that the very concept of a “normal childhood” is a chimera, a deception. There was no time in this nation’s history when children did not suffer. There was no time when parents’ minds were somehow perfectly at ease. The good old days we long to summon for our families–the invulnerable home, the unlocked doors, the consistent trustworthiness of neighbors, the boundlessness of opportunity–will always be maddeningly out of reach, because it never inhered in the first place. “Those who do believe that the ideal childhood ever existed . . . can do so only by leaving most American children out of the picture,” Thompson and Mac Austin write.
Over and again, on the pages of this book, we meet children who either suffered unforgivable indignities or were not given the privileges most of us presume our children are due. We are reminded of the children who slaved, the children who labored, the children who died as their parents pursued naive dreams and new frontiers. Rare was the child who was in school before the middle of the 19th Century. Great were the numbers who were orphaned or abused. Far more common than the girl wearing pigtails and tossing jacks in the tree-lined yard was the child who worked the narrow crevices of mines, playing games with the rats as her pastime. There were great pockets of time in this nation’s history when children reaching age 10 or 12 perceived themselves to be no more than “another mouth to feed” and set off in the company of hobos and vagrants to make a living on their own. There was never, in short, any absolute, unthreatened bliss. For every terror that faces us today, for every mad, cruel horror in our headlines, there is a historical equivalent.
What are we to make of this? Who are the children we have been? Why are we still shocked by contemporary “A Child Called `It’ “-style memoirs when history yields us the testimony of 8-year-old Mary Ellen Wilson, who spoke the following words in a New York court in April 1874:
“I have no recollection of ever having been kissed by any one–have never been kissed by mamma. I have never been taken on my mamma’s lap and caressed or petted. I never dared to speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped. I have never had, to my recollection, any more clothing than I have at present.”
There have always been, as Thompson and Mac Austin write, “some children who were cruel and violent, some who were exploited, and some who were loved. Child labor and poverty are ongoing problems, neither new nor `over.’ “
And yet, it seems, most children do persevere and endure. Most children become grown-ups eager, or at least willing, to have children of their own. History approximates and turns upon itself, and while we seem destined to repeat some of our most egregious mistakes, we cannot–we must not–lose sight of the stunning ingenuity of children, their flat-out instinct for survival. There is a way to hope for the future, in other words, without sentimentalizing the past, and one of the many ways we can be led in that direction is by studying the work of Wendy Ewald, the brilliant photographer whose collaborative process enables us to view the world of children through that most important lens of all: the child’s own. By teaching children of pressing circumstance–on Indian reservations, in the Appalachians, in Colombia, in India, in Mexico, in Saudi Arabia, in Durham, N.C., and elsewhere–to stare through a viewfinder and freeze what they see, Ewald has given children and the rest of us a power beyond words.
In “Secret Games: Collaborative Works With Children 1969-1999” (Scalo, 335 pages, $49.95 paper), a handsome and important compendium of her last three decades of work, Ewald explains how her life’s work was influenced by an afternoon at a cemetery in the company of 14-year-old Merton Ward. Ewald was a young high school graduate at the time, and she had gone to live for a summer at an Indian reservation in Canada, where she taught a photography class to children. That afternoon, Ewald writes:
“Merton took his Polaroid Sharp Shooter, I had my Crown Graphic. We began casually photographing the whole graveyard, then moved in closer to take pictures of Merton’s grandmother’s grave.”
Whereas Ewald “centered the white tombstone and shot it slightly from above,” Merton took the picture from below, “placing the headstone far to the right so that it veered out of the frame.”
“My image shows what a Native American graveyard looks like,” Ewald continues. “You can read the inscription on the gravestone and see the simple handmade crosses in the background. Merton’s picture doesn’t do that. It is grainy, washed-out, and the proportions are `wrong.’ But his cemetery is a frightening place. No one goes there–or if they do, they often see ghosts.”
What Merton had seen, and how Merton had seen it, was a turning point for Ewald. “Although Merton did not consciously compose his photographs to reflect his feelings, I realized his pictures portrayed reservation life more accurately and expressively than mine,” she writes. From then on, Ewald began to use her art not as a way of simply memorializing her own vision, but as a means of learning how others bear witness. Ewald’s collaborative works with children yield stunning portraits of childhood realities and dreams. “Secret Games,” which came out in 2000, mixes her art and commentary with that of the children she came to know.
Much of the time the work is haunting, as when, for example, Ewald asks a group of children in a poor rural patch of Kentucky to photograph their fantasies. “I dreamt I killed my best friend, Ricky Dixon,” the caption under one photograph reads, and there in the stark black-and-white photograph is Ricky himself, emulating death in the prong of an old tree. “I am Dolly Parton,” another caption reads, and there is a picture of a girl with puffy blonde hair and plastic jewelry, vamping in the scruff of her back yard. Some of the children’s work is energizing; some of it feels like true art. But most of all the work suggests tenacity, determination, an assertion of will over lousy circumstance. It speaks of and for children who believe in their own survival, who refuse to believe in anything less than a time when they will bring children of their own into this world.
“I was born in this place,” says Sebastian Gomez Hernandez, of Chamula, Mexico. “My parents told me that when I was born and was a baby, they gave me salt, a machete, a notebook and a pencil, so that when I became an adult, I would be a worker and a smart student. I also remember a story when my mother went to wash clothes in the water hole and I fell in. My mother quickly pulled me out so that I wouldn’t drown. If she hadn’t done this, I wouldn’t exist now.”
