They were pictures of ordinary life as seldom seen — wet beds and nosebleeds, naked children playing in the curve of a dark river, their bodies as slim and white as tapers. Sally Mann’s photographs, published in her collection “Immediate Family,” in 1992, brought her instant celebrity and censure. The undeniable innuendo in her images of innocence (Baby Virginia peering at us through heart-shaped Lolita sunglasses) caused conservative and feminist critics alike to accuse her of producing child pornography. In one photograph Mann’s son, Emmett, poses in a homage to Edward Weston’s “Torso of Neil” (1925), but where the original was cropped at the boy’s waist, Mann’s picture features her son’s genitals and thighs, streaked with ribbons of dried juice. The title of the photograph, lest you miss the point, is “Popsicle Drips.”
The commotion has cooled, but those images, often of such surpassing beauty, have lost none of their power — nor have the questions they incite. Mann claimed her photographs were the product of a collaboration with her children, but what sort of collaboration is truly possible when the artist is one’s mother?
The question of our obligation to our children’s privacy has been posed reluctantly, if at all. For years, many writers, journalists, artists of all kinds, even those with very decided views on power, consent and vulnerability, have aired the images and secrets of their children with apparent ease. Frustrations, private anguish and private games, terrors, toilet habits, imaginative worlds, confidences and drawings have fallen under fair use where these parents are concerned, an apparent prerogative, and perk, of the job. This entitlement seems to stem from the odd status of “the child” who is regarded as not quite a person but as a potential person, perhaps — one who might not be able to speak, or speak clearly enough; who might be tempestuous and not quite sane, in the way of the toddler, or who might forget or not notice so much of what is being documented. Such characteristics, read as incompetencies, seem seized upon to provide the rationale for qualified personhood. Or partial personhood — some mothers describe feeling so at one with their children that it is truly their own subjectivity, their own lives they are sharing.
A shift is underway. It’s not quite a #MeToo movement for the child subject, but there is a growing awareness of what it costs to perform one’s childhood for a parent and a public, one stoked not by moral panics or abstract concerns “for the children,” but by children themselves, a generation growing up in front of cameras, often wielded by a parent.
Documentaries about family vlogging like “The Devil in the Family,” “Born to be Viral,” or “Bad Influence” reveal the pressures; the long, uncompensated hours; the frightening sexualization by strangers. Shari Franke, the daughter of one such “mommy vlogger,” Ruby Franke, convicted last year of child abuse, has a new memoir, “The House of My Mother,” in which she describes growing up under the weight of such scrutiny. “But for me, a 12-year-old girl, this constant surveillance was excruciating,” she writes. “All I wanted was to grow up in peace, deal with my bodily changes and these pesky new zits without it being recorded. But my mother was omnipresent, her phone an extension of her arm … every little moment was mined for content.”
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