Presumed Innocence by Anne Higonnet, Rachel Lafo
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Book Summary Author: Anne Higonnet, Rachel Lafo Editor: Kate Dempsey Photographer: Bruce Davidson Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2008-03-15 ISBN: 0945506562 Number of pages: 160 Publisher: DeCordova Museum |
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Book Reviews of the Presumed Innocence
Customer Review: Presumed Innocent
Summary: 4 Stars
Presumed Innocent is a catalogue of photographs whose dates of creation range from the birth of the medium to the present decade. The artists contained within its pages are from a breadth of backgrounds as diverse as the above mentioned dates. The visual content of the book is contextualized by an excerpt from Anne Higonnet's book: Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of the Ideal Childhood in which she explains the history of the child as a subject and how the vocabulary of the "pure" child entered the visual arts, as well as the controversy surrounding the use of children in photography.
While the subjects of the photographs are all children, they offer us a wide scope of these popular yet controversial sitters: child prostitutes, children from lower classes, revolutionary symbols, social documentary work, or highly produced images. The photographers use most of these children as personas: symbols for the changing definition of innocence that the photograph inherently captures and preserves. The author of the forward, Rachel Lafo has categorized the images in a few groups including: children alone, children at risk, rites of passage, constructed narratives.
An example of this is Loretta Lux, who photographs young girls and digitally alters their proportions to be more "pretty" Lux exaggerates their features with large heads and eyes, accompanied with doll like limbs. When we initially look at the photographs the girls charm us, but we soon become uncomfortable. The viewer gets a sense that something is slightly off, and soon the photographs become haunting. This sort of subtle confrontation challenges our similarly constructed social ideas of childhood innocence.