Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood - Review

Art in America, Feb, 1999 by Calvin Bedient

Higonnet has written a skillful, highly compressed history of the picture of innocence since the 18th century. Facts and dead-on visual analyses crowd each paragraph. She reflects the latest trends in art-historical analysis. But the low-grade fever of sensationalism that mars her history of the Romantic image also infects the thesis which climaxes the book. She laments the now-irreversible emergence of images of the Knowing child, swarming, all sweetness and sting, out of works like Nabokov's Lolita and Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby. This is a development, she observes, that results in such tasteless tastes of honey as Brooke Shields's notorious Calvin Klein ad, advertising nothing so much as the absence of panties under the young model's jeans.

Higonnet not only comes up with a label that insinuates far more (and far more prevalent) sexual precocity than is justified by any of the ads and art photography she discusses; she also insists that the image of the Knowing child is now widely disseminated, and accommodated as fairly innocuous, give or take isolated outbreaks of moral indignation and, at the extreme limit, investigations of child pornography.

The eighth of her nine chapters protests the absurdities of the recent terror-based antipornography laws against pictures of nude children. Your local photography lab, as she says, can now sit in judgment of your soul. She cautions that "bodies represented nude or naked or undressed are not necessarily sexual, although of course they could be"--a caution that all but tears itself up after the comma but that, in any case, shows a sobriety which would have been welcome in the discussion of the sexual thrills latent in images of Romantic innocence.

Higonnet here has a cause that almost runs away with her book, which had previously conducted itself as a morally concerned academic history, not a tract. In the final sections, however, "the public dangers of photography," the art now releasing a flood of openly disquieting images of childhood, necessitates the confrontation of the issue of "children's rights to safety" versus "adults' rights to freedom of expression." The constructive approach, she counsels, is to ask "how both kinds of rights can be protected at once."

How can they both be protected? Higonnet does little more than call for replacing the automatic esthetic alibi (she understands the postal inspector who said, "art is anything you can get away with") with

basic questions, including but not limited to formal issues. Does the image ... treat its medium with skill, imagination, or critical thought? Does the image interpret its subject? For what purposes and in what circumstances was the image made, exhibited, or circulated? The list of questions could go on and on. It should go on and on.

There's no magic formula here, but the advice is sane, and it's a start.

Why, then, muddy the already troubled waters by coining the label "the Knowing child," a red flag of a term, especially if a child's previous sexual "knowing" can be used, as we see in the new film version of Lolita, to lessen the moral liability of an abuser? "Knowing" is employed, she says, "in honor of ... Henry James's 1887 novel What Maisie Knew," a work several critics have lately regarded as anticipating Lolita. If she believes that "real children seem to be endangered when photographs imply ... that children are not completely sexually innocent," why send one sniffing after their corruption? Why, when she can hardly muster a single image that bears out the sensational whisper of her term?