Images of Childhood: A Visual History From Stone to Screen

Description

Drawing on a rich legacy of pictorial evidence, Images of Childhood examines historical constructions of childhood, and how they reinforce or challenge the prevailing view of it as a state of innocence. Each chapter explores visual elements such as composition, lighting, clothes, accessories, and body language in order to track our many different constructions of children: as members of the family unit, gendered, adults, schooled, aesthetic, victims, threats, economic value, and political propaganda. Skilfully navigating the distances between a multitude of perspectives on this topic, Paul Duncum considers how viewers’ ways of seeing change throughout history, with age, or based on individual interpretation. He also shows how the child within contributes to the way adults gaze at children. The result is a text far broader in scope than any other in its field, as art history is interwoven with childhood studies to explore how we visually present the child – and to highlight the real life implications that these depictions and constructions have on children’s rights. Cover Contents Introduction Defining childhood Conflicting conceptions Modern childhood Childhood and adult psychology Pictures of childhood Scope and outline 1 Children as Worthy Subjects Antiquity Medieval morphology and limited pictorial functions The sacred and secular of the Renaissance Seventeenth-century developments Eighteenth-century sentiment Nineteenth-century Romanticism Mass production and photography Twentieth-century proliferation Twenty-first-century digital saturation 2 Children as Family Members Families are not all the same Families as spiritual union Families as bonds of ancestry and property Families as bonds of affection Happy snaps and power Digitally networked families Public families as pedagogy Dysfunctional families as pedagogy Controlling the image 3 Children as Gendered Patriarchy and feminism Clothes and color Attributes and activities Girls fight back Shifting sands 4 Children as Adults Historical integration Exceptional children Premature sexuality Dependence reasserted Separation ensured 5 Children as Schooled Students as organic wholes Students as God-fearing Students as good citizens in the making Students as consumers Students realizing their individual potential Control and agency 6 Children as Aesthetic Objects Aesthetics and aestheticism Aesthetically beautiful children The culture of cuteness Aesthetics and its opposites Aestheticism and anxiety Aestheticism, innocence, and reality 7 Children as Victims Child sacrifice Infanticide and filicide War and famine Destitution Beatings and abuse Child labor Child pornography Memorializing children Counternarratives Sins and sorrows 8 Children as Threats Horrid children The child Jesus as malevolent The original holy terrors Real child abusers and murderers Unruly street children Child soldiers Multiple threats 9 Children as Economic Value Children in slave economies Productive and consumer capitalism Servants of productive capitalism Servants of consumer capitalism Leveraging children’s sign value Children as economic entities 10 Children as Propaganda Selling succession Children as ethnic and population policy Recruitment children The co-option of meaning Children’s exploitability 11 Children as Innocent The ideology of innocence The iconography of innocence The longevity of innocence The heyday of innocent childhood The invitation of innocence Child abuse Child nudity Innocence as incitement Innocence versus social justice Childhood and continuity References Image Credits Index