The thieves
Twice in the past month, someone in the park has tried to photograph our children. The first was on the prowl during the daytime on Halloween in the Nethermead, a feral clearing deep into Prospect Park edged on one side by enormous trees that stand like ancient columns. The spot is beloved by the yardless children of Prospect Lefferts, who are drawn on their neon scooters over the waterfall, their ginormous bike helmets always halfway falling off so that the chinstrap is cupping their nostrils and their bodies seem to be 50% forehead. The usual rules of public parks are suspended in this liminal zone between the “creek” on one side and park transverse on the other. Before 8 a.m., dog people unclip their leashes, herders, retrievers, and pups with eyes on the sides of their heads darting off to form a roving scrum of Dog galloping and yipping as it sniffs its shared butt; after 8 a.m., parents do the same with their kids. The brush around the lawn, however lovely, is widely believed to be an ad hoc bathroom. I believe the rumors because my kids pee in there all the time.
On this particular Saturday, Pandemic Halloween, superheroes and princesses were digging their stubby hands through the leaves in search of miniature packs of Starburst, the adults all stretched out in the sunshine on their blanket islands hoping not to have to get up and do anything. My husband saw her first, and the adults all reflexively swiveled their faces toward the threat: a woman in a long coat with a Nikon hung around her neck picking her way through the grove. She had all the subtlety of Slenderman, standing near a thoroughly unremarkable tree and pretending to photograph its bark while angling the aperture at our children. (If she had just strung up a slackline or carried a saxophone she could probably have blended right on in.)
I watched as my husband marched over to the very average tree and confronted the thief of souls. When I feel wronged, I’m historically very bad at saying anything, as shown by every trip to the Sephora Beauty Bar since 2009 — my husband does not have this problem. This is how the conversation went:
Him: Are you photographing our kids?
Her: I—
Him: —DON’T.
Her: … OK.
She surrendered easily, slinking off into the thicket containing a grimy tree that the kids like to dangle from, through to where she could no doubt resume the hunt for youthful blood.
The second guy tried to photograph our kids while they climbed a statue of Abraham Lincoln in a biting crosswind, the sun getting ready to set at 3:05 p.m. on a Sunday. When my husband, the Attorney, called out Wannabe Terrence Malick, the guy said that the constitution guaranteed him the right to photograph whomever he pleased, inclusive of grotty preschoolers in puffy coats and Crayola face masks. I’m not sure the exact legalese my husband responded with, but it was something polished like “go fuck yourself, man.”
The question is what these people hoped to get out of photographing other people’s children. Maybe the lady had been marooned in a studio apartment for nine months without social contact, maybe the guy was doing a photo series on how children are being taught about the complicated legacy of America’s statues. The most simple explanation is they thought: ooh, kids playing, artsy. I think that’s what drives me bananas. It’s fine for me to have trite and obviously staged photos of my kids tossing maroon leaves into the air on cue, but some stranger with a nicer camera? No. There’s something dishonest, too, about the cherubic baby photos. They edit out something crucial about who our kids are (in Japhy’s case, Bob Hawke trapped in a toddler’s body. He’s taken to yelling “GEEZUSS!” when he knocks his wooden fruit pieces off the Hape stovetop). Bad photos of kids lose something about the child, and paint in embarrassing ideas about childhood by the adults who take them. They’re the botched Jesus fresco of photography. It doesn’t offend me as a parent, it offends me as someone who appreciates art.
Also I don’t want people with cameras about when my kids suddenly drop their pants to poop in the bushes at the edge of the meadow.
The tourists
Going back to 1991, we find ourselves in Lombok, a small island in the Indonesian archipelago, where my family and I have gotten out of a minivan to take in the coastline. It is a scenic detour that takes me away from the elaborate hotel pools and different colors of Fanta that I spend the trip documenting in my travel diary. We tour ancient temples, monkey forests, and deafening silver factories, and I reliably chronicle the day with “had banana pancakes for breakfast and later a red Fanta.” Video footage of the trip shows me perpetually trying to escape the frame in my Beverly Hills 90210 T-shirt. I am 9 years old, and already deeply conditioned by Kodak to hate and fear photographs. In a family of brunettes, I am ginger, a fact that makes me more susceptible to the punishing rays of the sun, less photogenic, and an object of interest in our travels, the only non-brunette for miles.
There are other tourists at this outcropping, including two plump women in fancy sunglasses, rich Indonesians that my mother is able to converse with thanks to her continuing ed studies of Bahasa Indonesia. “Janet,” she says gesturing at the ladies, “just go stand over there for a minute.” The women are arranged with the ocean at their backs, smiling at me expectantly. I have been sold! I skulk over to my new family and stand still, Shannon Doherty pursing her lips on my chest, looking back at my family from the outside. On cue, I send a vintage cutting-onions face back at the camera, and find myself released. Having gotten photographic proof of a child with hair the color of a rockmelon, the tourists are onto the next thing, perhaps a sarong stand, perhaps the guy using a machete to disembowel pineapples inside 30 seconds.
We have no copy of this photo! I am impressed even now at my parents agreeing to it when I refused to pose for their own camera at Borobudur. In any case, it is something to imagine yourself in a tourist’s photo album far, far away, pinned between two soft shoulders for all eternity.
The computer
Japhy generated a video montage of himself while scrolling my camera roll today, thanks to the intuitive design of Apple Photo. Set to what sounds like the Pogues, it has that twee “time, isn’t it passing!” vibe you get from ads for AT&T around the holidays, only with the Lynchian discord of a photo of Scout-as-a-baby slotted in partway through, panned over with the same emotional intensity as all the photos labeled “JAPHY” by the AI. It is a life, viewed in the rearview, only with a sub-100% accuracy for the life being chronicled.
Apple is never entirely sure whom it is tagging, and the facial recognition technology seems to work especially poorly on babies, contrary to all those crime shows where they can use a computer program to project a baby forward in time into a flat-ironed 30-year-old to solve a cold case. Newborn photos are, let’s be honest, quite interchangeable. Now that I’m five years deep into parenthood, I can almost see why my grandmothers felt the need to scrawl the names of their children on the back of their photos: figuring out who is pulling the cat’s tail in the blurry photo through the sliding door eventually becomes more challenging. I posit that there are multiple framed photos of the wrong baby swaddled in Aden & Anais on the walls of America’s houses.
Having said that, I was never mixed up with my brother and sister because I came out with the red hair — the proverbial Powerball.
The artist
Sally Mann blew up after she published “Immediate Family,” a collection of photos of her kids at home on their farm. Her work captures the feral energy I recognize from the 6 o’clock hour in my apartment, but generated a lot of concern for the wellbeing of her kids, who were naked in some of the photos, and who each prophylactically saw a psychologist prior to signing off the book. Mann responded to criticism of the photography in an essay, in which she explained:
“The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.
Even the children understood this distinction.”
She had considered holding the book for 10 years, until such a time “when the kids won’t be living in the same bodies. They’ll have matured and they’ll understand the implications of the pictures.” The kids wanted her to go ahead and publish them; it was the adults who had a harder time differentiating the humans from the images.
I recently spoke to Amber Davisson, a sociologist whose focus is on digital representations, for a piece; she views all media like photos and videos as presenting us with, in her words, “ghosts” of the person photographed. This seems right. We photograph our children to capture something of the essence of them, whether or not they’re actually Victorian farmers, before they change again. As they grow into their cheeks, the gap between then and now becomes more poignant, until one day there we are in our twilight years, stalking through a meadow in our pea coats, angling our lens at someone else’s children, hoping to capture a tincture of whatever it was that has been lost.
How it happened
Days of our lives: The other day, Scout asked me how a new day is made, and it took me a minute to figure out that she meant “how does Monday become Tuesday?” etc. I had to get into the hours of the day, and how one day kicked over into the next at midnight, which now I think about it seems very dodgy. The middle of the night? When it’s pitch black? It is curious that we decided as a species to make sure this suspicious work took place while no one was watching.
Linksss
Edith Zimmerman has a baby dream.
“Actors Are Too Hot Hill is a silly place to die, yet the acclaim for “The Queen’s Gambit” series, which stars an actual former model, has stranded me there, unable to descend until I have said my piece.” — Sarah Miller, who else
If you ever wondered how long it takes man to regress to beast, the answer is three weeks.
From this essay by Hettie Judah in a new report on artists x motherhood, so many things, but here’s one: “Motherhood can also change an artist’s access to space. With less freedom to work, and the financial pressure of a family, many give up their studio while their children are young, and work instead, from home. This has an impact on the work, which, through necessity, often becomes smaller – art of a domestic scale historically associated with women artists.”
You might die but your tattoo can live forever!
And, plausible!
THANK YOU FOR READING <3