Unexpected Beauty: The Volumetric Toddler

For several years, I have been collecting vernacular photographs, part of the ocean of images produced by citizen photographers, some dating back to the beginning of the last century. Many of them are from our family collection. Others were gifted to me or purchased at flea markets and auctions. I believe in the value of this visual experience and I try to write seriously about the images that hold my eye. The new acquisition below came to me this week.

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If I were a painter, I would paint children this way: strange, mysterious, uncanny creatures, adorable and sinister in equal measure. This child is dwarfed by the house behind her, a default arrangement in the images of the time, and yet she doesn’t seem to be dwarfed at all. She stands on sturdy legs, with fleshy arms. She is as solid as the stone blocks that hold up the structure.

The snapshot is clearly a case of strained exposure, The camera tries to deal with the bright white of the wall and leaves the face of the child veiled, shrouded. It is as impenetrable as the interior beyond the window and the curtains. The result is an image that says something about knowing: we cannot know the insides of what’s around us, even if those things are as commonplace as a child.

What is most appealing here is the geometry of the scene. The wall is an array of horizontal lines, interrupted by the parallelogram of the open window. The child, meanwhile, devolves into solids: a dome, a disc, the cone of her body, all supported by the columns of her legs. Everything here is crisply defined, as if drawn by pencil or a sharp, small brush. You could reassemble this scene with a set of blocks. There is nothing here that feels organic or natural; no flowing swell of spirit or energy. Even the vegetation has been mostly swept away. This is not so much the evocation of a human being as an essay in constructing the figure of a child. It could be one of those jointed wooden figures used by sculptors and painters.

And what is the toddler holding in her hands? It looks like it could be a net for catching butterflies, but that’s only a guess, an intuition. There is so much distance between ourselves and this child that it’s impossible to discern the nature of the object. The toddler and her wand (?) remain remote, mysterious.

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No robots here; just a human author, trying to make sense of the world. AI may be very good for some things, but it runs against the grain for me.