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July 7, 2008
We now have an ongoing debate about the overt manipulation of sexuality by mass culture, the consequent “premature sexualization” of girls in the coming-of-age stages in their lives and the bombardment of sexually-driven advertising specifically oriented to children.
In this debate the cultural and moral conservatives come close to saying that a photograph of a young child is inherently pornographic (ie., nudity is an obscenity) and that every nude photograph of all children in every circumstance should be banned. This, it is argued, is the only way to protect the innocence of children from the perverted gaze of paedophiles.
For these conservatives Art Monthly, in putting the image below on its cover in protest at the treatment of Bill Henson, is being deliberately provocative. The proponents of arts censorship in the New South Wales Government have referred the magazine to the Classification Board, whilst others have called for the removal of all public funding.
Polixeni Papapetrou’s, Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs (2003), from the Dreamchild series (2002-3).
Now our cultural context is one of the proliferation of pornography in contemporary visual culture, and, in this context, photographs of children have become problematic as they suggest a defiled innocence and the exploitation of children as sex objects. The assumption is that children are junior members of the family needing a protective and nurturing domestic environment, which involves the discouragement of sexual behaviour.
The issue is not simply that of child protection being the only consideration, as the conservatives are wont to claim. There are also issues of childhood sensuality, play acting and portraits and art history.
Thus Polixeni Papapetrou's Dreamchild series is a re-staging of the staged child tableau found in a selection of photographs of young girls by Lewis Carroll. had done. It is true that as Carroll was criticized for his supposed lewd intent---(the speculation was that he was, in modern parlance, a paedophile) and tarnished, so Papapetrou has also faced criticism for sexualizing children and so creating pornographic images.
Lewis Carroll, Beatrice Hatch, 1873, coloured by Anne Lydia Bond on Carroll's instructions
Papapetrou's Olympia is seated nude on a rock and stares out at the viewer with a naïve yet attentive gaze. The possible interpretation of Olympia as a sexual being is tempered by our knowledge about the gaze being that of her mother taking the photograph. The mother-artist creates a sort of filter between her daughter and the viewer.
Once it is acknowledged that behind the child lies the mother’s presence, we have the possibility of another interpretation. Nudity is then interpretable as childlike play rather than explicit sexuality, and the child’s innocence emerges as a result of this juxtaposition of child, mother-artist and the history of visual culture. As Adrian Martin argues in this essay:
Papapetrou is not out to expose the 'dark side' of Carroll's fancies; rather, she is trying to clear out a space in which to insert her own fantasy and imagination. She confronts the charged history of Carroll's imagery but also, in borrowing his idiom, creates a remarkably intimate mode in which a mother observes her daughter and watches her slowly grow into a woman, as the child tries on and discards a myriad of masks both literal and figurative.
Her body of work draws from traditions of painting, cinema and theatre – and thus coming at the medium of photography sideways to the purism of modernism she has revitalised the practice of mise en scène or staging.
The debate in the debate around the sexualisation of girls in the media has narrowed into a polarized stalematewhich focuses primarily on the effect, if any, of sexualized images on young girls, while discussion of corporate responsibility remains negligible.So does that of artist mothers who have made photographs of children since photography’s inception that express the maternal gaze, with its relational intimacy and mother-child non-sexual desire.This enactment of sexual love and desire is quite different from the pornographic and paedophilic gaze.
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Gary
The girl who posed nude as a six-year-old in Papapetrou's Olympia is defending the use of the photograph on the front cover of an arts magazine. Now 11 years old, Olympia Nelson says she has no problems with the photo her mother, Melbourne photographer Polixeni Papapetrou, took of her when she was six. She says
Rudd said that, "A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way. Frankly, I can't stand this stuff." The Rudd Government has asked the Australia Council to develop a set of protocols to cover the representation of children in art.