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Photographing Children: the Works of Tierney Gearon and Sally Mann
Abstract
This article investigates the British media response to the censorship of Tierney Gearon's photographs in the Saatchi exhibition `I Am a Camera' in March 2001. It suggests that the confusion over how to `read' the photographs - as porn or art - is actually an indication of a more general cultural confusion over fixed categories of difference. This study is undertaken by drawing a comparison to the media's response to the slightly earlier work of the photographer Sally Mann. It suggests that the different readings of the two artists' photographs of their children are indicative of a number of cultural shifts - first in terms of feminism and in particular a current crisis in looking that reflects a cultural anxiety over adult and child (female) sexuality, and definitions of public and private representations of the child.
... The following day, the weekly tabloid News of the World published an edited version of one of Gearon"s offending photographs and an article with the headline "Child Porn They Call Art" and labelled the show "perversion under the guise of art." This set off a fierce argument in the press, academia, and the art world concerning the parameters of both art and [child] pornography [see 15], which continues in various forms today. Ultimately, the police took no action against the photographer or the gallery. ...
This essay addresses censorship's potential limits on freedom of expression in the context of obscenity and the effect this has had on the exhibition of cultural objects. Although this is a matter of vital interest in the contemporary United States, this essay focuses on cultural debates that arose in the U.S. primarily during the nineteen-eighties. Analysis of individual artists and art exhibitions is situated within a legal context of constitutional law, case law, and governing statutes, which still define the parameters of obscenity today. Censorship will continue to be a hot topic in the U.S. for years to come and this review should help readers attain a broader legal perspective.
In the foreword to a recent special edition of Critical Criminology, Ball, Buist, and Woods write that queer criminology ‘can speak to a number of people and communities. It can take us down multiple paths, and it can remain an open space of intellectual and political contestation’ (2014: 4). Using this observation as a starting point, this chapter examines the subject to which queer criminology speaks. As this book attests, queer criminology is a comparatively new orientation. While criminology has addressed issues of sexual difference, it has generally posited a particular kind of ‘queer’ subject — predominantly those who identify as gay, lesbian, and more recently bisexual or trans. Compounding this shortcoming are the scenarios in which sexual difference has traditionally been interrogated. For example, victimisation has overwhelmingly been preoccupied with prejudice-motivated crime and interpersonal violence. On the other hand, research examining scenarios of queer criminality have typically pivoted around sexual deviance and sex work. Peterson and Panfil insightfully observe that the consequence of this tradition has been to produce a narrow frame of sexed and gendered difference within criminological scholarship (2014: 3).
This book brings together the different disciplinary strands of psychoanalysis, sociology and feminism to consider motherhood and mothering. The psychoanalytic focus includes both theoretical and clinical applications ranging from textual analysis of films, books, art, theory and popular culture through to qualitative research on mothers, clinical case studies and analyses of therapeutic technique. The sociological focus includes a critique of therapy culture and its gendered implications. This collection is not only a contribution to psychoanalytic feminism but also, and importantly, a contribution to the feminist and sociological critique of the institution of therapy and the role of the therapist. Examining the maternal turn in psychoanalytic theory and practice and the rise of women therapists, this book seeks to shed light on the feminisation of therapy. Taking shape around five core themes: the therapist as mother, the mother in therapy, mothers in art and culture, psychoanalytic theory of mothers and mothering, and sociological interventions in therapy culture , this book endeavours to generate dialogue across disciplinary borders while placing mothers, mothering and motherhood at the centre of analysis
"The collection of 23 essays provides an exciting snapshot of contemporary theorising on the maternal within psychoanalytic and social theory. The introduction serves as an excellent overview of this interdisciplinary field and its importance both to motherhood studies and broader feminist thinking. This book is a triumph!"
Assistant Professor Julie Kelso, Department of Philosophy and Literature, Bond University
"Mothering and Psychoanalysis brings together a vibrant collection of critical, interdisciplinary perspectives on psychoanalysis, feminism, motherhood and sociology. In her engaging introduction, Petra Bueskens provides a comprehensive overview of the key debates in the field and their contemporary implications. The collection includes reprinted essays from important thinkers and international contributions from a diverse range of writers who offer fresh and original insights into psychoanalysis and mothering. The book represents some of the best of the new scholarship in maternal studies."
Associate Professor Julie Stephens, College of Arts, Victoria University, Australia
Although Winnicott believed that “Freud... neglected infancy as a state”
(“The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” 587), psychoanalytic theory
has always had a developmental perspective, founded on the principle
that early experience, particularly within the mother-infant dyad, underlies
both health development and the development of psychopathology, which
is understood to be a manifestation, under conditions of stress, of problematic
experiences with primary caregivers during infancy and early childhood.
Freud nally a�orded a central role to the mother in the child’s development, stating that the child’s relationship with its mother was “. . .unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the rst and strongest love-object and as the prototype of all later love-relations - for both sexes” (Freud “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis” 188).
Research on children and youth increasingly features young people's photographs and/or young people as photographers. While this suggests that quite a lot is known about young people's relationships to photographs and camera technologies, this is not the case. Following an overview of studies that engage with young photographers, this article demonstrates why still very little is known about young people's photographic practices - that is, the range of ways and media through which young people take, feature in, and use photographs. The author argues that this gap in knowledge needs to be addressed. Important aspects of childhood, youth and growing up, including identity, belonging and memory, are often experienced and/or expressed in part through photographs and photography.
This paper arose amongst the making and showing of a film and questions whether there are possibilities for interrupting powerful discursive frames that work at producing ‘the normal child’. Traditionally there has been a lack of interest in the use and critique of visual culture in educational research. Perhaps this lack of interest provides fertile opportunities to know something of the structure of education as a discipline, the rules that structure it and its deep grammar; it may also open up opportunities for disciplinary boundary-crossings where fields that embrace visual culture, such as photography and filmmaking, can bring their playfulness across binaries, including notions of certainty/ambivalence, to qualitative research in education. By turning to art theory, our aims are to interfere with our utopian longings that steadfastly cling to educational notions of the child.
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