When They Were Young:
A Photographic Retrospective of Childhood From the Library of Congress
By Robert Coles
Kales Press, 160 pages, $39.95
I have spent the morning looking at the faces of children, on platinum- and silver-tinged black-and-white photographs. A boy stretching his shadow across the sand. A well-dressed toddler armed with a toy pistol at a parade. Two girls on spindly tricycles alongside a boy on a narrow bike. And many others. These children don’t know I am studying them. These children are not children anymore.
A photograph captures the right now of time, which becomes, one resolute instant later, the before. Before the boy blinked. Before the baby cried. Before the war came. Before the girl fell in love. Before they were old. It is impossible to look at photographs of children and not wonder what happened next, not try to imagine the forward motion of a life, not turn the picture into story. Photographs raise more questions than they answer, and this can make them irresistible, transfixing.
The photographs collected in the new Library of Congress retrospective “When They Were Young” are genuinely transfixing. Exquisitely composed and handsomely reproduced, they depict children being children all around the world, over a span of more than 150 years. They take us to Harlem, to Paris, to Puerto Rico, to Wisconsin, to the rapids of the Nile. They take us into factories, and they take us into privilege. They take us into the hush of secrets and the overt rituals of play, into homes and to the side of dusty roads.
The photos are not, for the most part, carefree snapshots. They are instead considered works of art by such renowned photographers as Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano. The very artistry here adds a layer of mystery to the portraits, making it difficult to know which subjects were performing for the camera, copping an attitude, or holding a prop, and which were simply being their unadorned child selves. What were the photographers looking for in the children they turned into art? What was the story they intended to tell? How did politics influence composition?
I yearn to know the history of these photographs, yearn to know, for example, how it was that Hine found the light-eyed, broad-faced boy who sits so eloquently, so patiently for the picture Hine calls “Drought Victim From Kentucky.” I’d love to know what put such hope into the two girls’ smiles in Delano’s breathtaking “Children in Slum.” I can’t imagine what made the girl with the doll sit with her spine so straight in Russell Lee’s “Sharecropper’s Children,” or why the boy seems so stalwart in Delano’s “The Family of Peter V. Andrews.”
But the text that accompanies these exquisite photographs tells us little, perhaps because it’s impossible to say much more. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and child psychiatrist Robert Coles (a man whose many books have an honored place on my own bookshelf), the words offer almost no more than what we can see for ourselves in language that can feel, at times, sentimental or overblown.
About “Young Boy Crying,” from the Alan Lomax Collection, Coles says only, “The boy’s vivid expression of regret and melancholy is countered by his dad’s tender but firm hands, which aver human relatedness that is life’s great treasure.” About “Three African American Boys,” from the W.E.B. Du Bois Collection, Coles writes:
“These African American youths were seen together around 1900. We sense the unaffected nonchalance of two boys sitting, of one standing, their casual hats worn like crowns, their faces both impassive and appealing. They show us no hint of fear or the ingratiation that it can prompt in their very own young persons.”
Still, these photographs do speak for themselves, even if they cannot ever tell us all we’d like to know. Lighted by sun and made mysterious by shadow, they caution and promise, they devastate and enrich. Perhaps no single photograph in the book is more searing, more disturbing, more finally compelling than “Children Taking Shelter During a German Air Raid.” You could read these faces for hours, each one. You could imagine yourself with the kids, down in the ground. You could try to predict what happened next, but you will never know. This is one instant. This is before. This is the seduction and endless riddle of photographs.
