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.”
Content is king and sometimes comes trussed in the garb of great art. In her forthcoming book, “When All the Men Wore Hats,” Susan Cheever recalls herself as a child furiously accosting her father, John Cheever, for basing characters on her. “Under increasing pressure from me, he sometimes just went blooey, rattling on about his transcendent vision and the nobility of fiction until I was too bored to persist.” She never bought it. He was, she concluded, just very good at taking what he needed.
In a new book, “Art Work,” Mann herself returns to this question of license, as she examines how the forces of chance and control shape a photograph, or a career. In the past, she professed shock that her pictures of her children could be read as anything less than the product of maternal pride and affection. Now she writes with the bluntness of age. “No matter what I said or wrote,” she admits, “I wanted attention for the work and the easiest way to get it was obviously to put forward the most attention-grabbing imagery.” Trespass “is an undeniable necessity in almost all art forms,” she declares. “To be an artist means you must declare a loyalty to your art form and your vision that runs deeper than almost any other, even sometimes deeper than blood kinship.”
But just as she appears ready to hack through the knotty ethical questions that her work has always invited, she freezes. Mann can lay these two facts side by side — that her art is necessarily transgressive and that she has used her children in her art — but she cannot make them touch. She will not say that she transgressed where her children were concerned. If costs were incurred, she writes, they were to her. Had she not chosen to display such obviously provocative images, “Immediate Family” might have been a stronger, subtler book, and she might have enjoyed a warmer reception.
It’s a stubborn blind spot, and a common one — this squirrelly refusal to cop cleanly to what it means for the child when she is used in the service of art. Perhaps we do not need to hear from Mann or any parent about the nature of artistic transgression. The report we need might come from the other side of the camera or easel, from Cheever or Molly Jong-Fast, the daughter of Erica Jong, who also has a new book, the blistering “How to Lose Your Mother”; from Rose Boyt, who describes posing for her father, the painter Lucien Freud, in her book “Naked Portrait.”
The crudeness and crass commercialization of family vlogging and the kidfluencing industry — which rely on neither the alibi of great art nor the sentimental justifications of the oversharing parent — lay the nature of the encroachment bare. But these new works don’t always seek to cancel or condemn the parent. The “child art star,” as Mann’s daughter Jessie referred to herself and her siblings, spins in her ambivalence. These memoirs return their parents’ gaze, to ask: What happened to me, in your home and in your work? Was it harm; was it art? Can my pride coexist with my pain?
The child art star, in all her equivocation, is not a new figure on the scene. Christopher Robin Milne resented his father’s use of his likeness in the Winnie the Pooh stories, and Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for “Peter Pan,” seemed to live in a permanent state of rage at being associated with the character. In the memoir “Searching for Mercy Street” (1994), Linda Grey Sexton, the eldest daughter of Anne Sexton, described having to arrange sex with her boyfriend with military-grade secrecy, waiting for her mother to go out of town — “I had to wait until she was not hanging over me like a vulture, waiting to check the sheets and authenticate the act with a poem.”
Is it so very traumatic to find oneself in a poem? Is it possible to be “art-abused” in Mann’s flippant phrase? What is the real harm, especially in this age of frenetic self-exposure? Sally Mann’s husband, Larry, once defended her work by saying the children couldn’t possibly mind being photographed, since they had been photographed all their lives, and in the case of the youngest, from the second she had entered the world. (Mann set up a camera and captured the instant of Virginia’s birth, a little blur barreling out between her legs.)
These are the questions that the art child stars try to answer themselves. I call them children, but these writers have had long and varied careers. They have children of their own, and many have waited decades before writing these accounts, biding their time as if to be sure that they are correct in feeling that a strange and grave wrong was done them. They have worked slowly, one senses, to balance their hurt at being strip-mined for material with admiration for their parent, and in many cases, a feeling of wonder, even joy, at being a part of work that is important and lasting. They have waited — some seem to still be waiting — to feel as if they can claim their memories as their own. “Mother used to own all the words,” Linda Grey Sexton writes. “Now I own some of them too.”
Mann has defended her photographs, saying that “taking those pictures was an act separate from mothering, and the kids knew the difference. When I stepped behind the camera, and they stepped in front of it, I was a photographer, and they were actors and we were making a photograph.” What so many memoirs make clear is that Mann is correct — the child, at least in these accounts, did not lose sight of the parent. She lost sight of herself.
There is a remarkable consistency in the memoirs by the child art star: The child is at first dazzled by the adult interest, but then senses a split — as if they had acquired a second self, which lives in the painting or on the page, a self far more interesting and useful to the parent, and more significant to the world. One of John Cheever’s sons said that “off the page he had no interest in us whatsoever.” (Cheever himself seemed intermittently aware of this tendency; he noted it in his journal in a moment of lucidity over his morning Scotch: “Thinking of Susan, she makes the error of daring not to have been invented by me, of laughing at the wrong time and speaking lines I have not written. Does this prove that I am incapable of love or can only love myself?”) Jong-Fast tries to understand why her mother, despite profuse expressions of love, never wanted to see her. She realizes: “In her view, she did spend time with me — in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there. I may have felt that she was slightly allergic to me, but to her, she was spending time with the most important version of me.”
They grow up not believing in privacy, their own or anyone else’s. Cheever found that no detail of her life was off limits — her thumbsucking, the clothes she wore — all of them carefully sourced and served up in short stories. She fought bitterly with her father. But many child subjects gave permission. Sally Mann sent her older children to a psychologist before publishing “Immediate Family” to make sure they were comfortable having the photographs shared. Could the children really understand what was being asked of them as they posed or shared their stories?
These books turn the question of informed consent on its head. It’s not merely that the children could or couldn’t understand the full implications of allowing their image or their lives to appear in the parent’s work; it’s that the risks of refusing were too great. To refuse would be to cede all warmth and closeness with their parent; it would be to shatter their father’s work, his dream; to risk their mother’s livelihood. “At 5, I knew my place instinctively,” Shari Franke writes. “Be pliable. Be obedient. Shape and mold myself into whatever form would earn Ruby’s conditional affection. I was a plant straining toward to the sun contorting myself into unnatural shapes just to catch a ray of her approval.”
Even knowing what it would cost, many would agree all over again. In a 2001 documentary on Sally Mann, her son, Emmett, who suffered from schizophrenia as an adult and took his own life in 2016, said, “Growing up as a child of Sally Mann was not easy, at all.” He spoke of her intensity and drive as an artist, as a mother, saying that as much as he resented it, he loved it — “it’s very much a yin and yang.”
If the child’s perspective goes unacknowledged, and their compliance confused for collaboration, it might be because our focus has so often been elsewhere — on the needs and rights of the artist-parent, on the struggle to have domestic life and, specifically, motherhood, accepted as a subject worthy of study. Sharon Olds recalls how her poems about birth and her children enraged editors at literary magazines some 50 years ago. “They came back often with very angry notes,” she said. “They used to say, ‘Why don’t you try the Ladies’ Home Journal?’” Even now, even after those poems have been praised and taught; even after the work of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Catherine Opie, Rachel Cusk, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Guadalupe Nettel and others; one often stumbles on a strange, sheepish disclaimer in many books about motherhood, the author explaining that babies and children are not really her primary interest, and that she is surprised to find so much to say now that she has had her own.
We are so poor at seeing from the child’s point of view, so unwilling to do so, that it seems to require blunt sexualization — as in Mann’s “Popsicle Drips” or Ruby Franke filming her daughter buying her first bra — to get our attention to how children are being used. Even then, we may miss where other, perhaps more unbearable violations lie.
When Rose Boyt went to pose naked for her father, Lucien Freud, at 19, she did not want to look obedient. She lay down on his couch and covered her eyes with her hand. She asked him not to paint her leg hair. She did not know what her father could see from where he was standing or how much — her tensed, open thighs. “I was unaware of how much he could see from his vantage point. I think I understand now he wanted my permission to use what he could see, to shift the responsibility onto me and take advantage of my generosity, even if I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know what he was asking for.”
This is the place of pain in many of these accounts. It was not just being manipulated into poses they did not understand, or seeing their private lives so exposed that still smarts, or that has complicated their relationship with themselves; it was having to ratify the parent’s actions, to bear and authenticate the fiction that the transaction was one of the child’s generosity and not the adult’s appropriation.
“Oh, you beautiful doll,” Freud would sing to Boyt. “You great big beautiful doll/Let me put my arms around you/ I’m so glad I found you.”
My living room, where I sit on the floor, writing, has been cleaved by warring nations. Within large and precarious blanket forts flicker the shadows of my daughters, muttering dark imprecations. One fort-dweller is ill-advisedly trying to build a second story. I should intervene, but as I have been contemplating the pernicious effects of maternal scrutiny, I maintain a stately and ethical reserve.
Why do they love this so? All the games of childhood, from the very first — peekaboo, hide and seek — what a relief it must be to escape the adult gaze, even temporarily. Psychologists speak of paracosms — intricate empires of the imagination created by children, alternate worlds to conceal oneself and dream. (I’m reminded that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used “selve” as a verb.)
To listen to the child is not to silence the parent; they are not pitted against each other. What both often seek is the same thing — the space to imagine, to see the importance of their experiences acknowledged, to “selve” in peace. There are brilliant models of writing about the private worlds of children with respect and restraint. Yiyun Li has written two books about her sons, both of whom she lost to suicide — “Where Reasons End” and “Things in Nature Merely Grow.” The dead have no right to privacy, but watch how majestically Li writes her family’s shared story while keeping her children’s secrets, even after death. “The mother’s job,” she writes, “is to enfold, not unfold.”
A daughter materializes from a tent, like a djinn released from a lamp. She asks me what I am writing, and I tell her. Brows furrow. “Do you write about me?” “No,” I say, “I don’t.” Another look now — shy, furtive. “You would like me to?” I ask. “Oh yes,” she says, and she begins to hop, as she does when she is pleased. “I am extremely interesting.” I ask her to please refrain from unwinding my central thesis, and she ambles off.
We cannot know everything, but it is obscene to pretend to know less than we do. Sharon Olds later removed her children’s names from her poems. Outing them, she now said, was “morally wicked.” She would correct her poems in real time, too, revising certain lines. In an interview once, she read aloud her poem “Exclusive,” written for her daughter — “I have loved you instead of anyone else,/ loved you as a way of loving no one else,/ every separate grain of your body.” Midway through, she stopped. It was not right, the way she had it: “like a god, as I had built you within me.” She fixed it to read: “As you were built within me.” She did not touch the last line, she had no need. “Today I see it is there to be learned from you:/ to love what I do not own.”
Read by Kirsten Potter
Narration produced by Tanya Pérez
Engineered by Zak Mouton
Parul Sehgal is a critic at large for The New York Times. She was previously a columnist and senior editor at the Book Review. She is the recipient of the Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle for her criticism.
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