Content area
Full Text
Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood
Anne Higonnet. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998.
Anne Higonnet's book on the historical representation of children in the visual arts examines the construction of childhood from the careful perspective of a scholar and parent, aware of the pleasures and dangers attendant on anyone who speculates about childhood or children. Understanding that children are persons with a stake in the world and that "fewer subjects [are] more vital than the subject of childhood" (14), Higonnet's seriousness is underscored by her clear prose style that seems intended to reach a larger audience than the academic specialist. Indeed, because we all position ourselves as specialists of a sort about childhood and children, if only our own, all the more reason to challenge our taken-for-granted wisdom through an examination of the hidden history of childhood, made visible in three centuries of art. Constructed as innocent or erotic, the "natural child" posits competing essences of childhood and comprises the difficult terrain Higonnet travels in what she names "the visual inventions of childhood" (8).
The author is clearly most interested in contemporary photographs of children; her discussion includes Victorian portrait photography, the growing documentation of family life in home photographs, children's images put to commercial use, and the more problematic art photography of the sort that has stirred controversy in past years. Higonnet locates a crucial if incomplete paradigm shift in our ideas of children and childhood in those visual representations she calls "Knowing Children . . . images [that], for the first time in the history of art, endow children with psychological and physical individuality at the same time as they recognize them as being distinctively child-like" (12). To trace this development, Higonnet begins with "The Invention of Innocence," an analysis of the Romantic child in paintings and early photographs, to the second part of her book, "An Ideal in Crisis," in which she details the characteristics and contradictions posed by the invention of the Knowing Child.
Invention is an apt term because it is not a term of nature. It connotes the unique and the creative, but also the produced and the mechanical. Most importantly for Higonnet, inventions...