Kids have been in the news a good bit lately. A few months back you may recall the big flap when President Obama delivered a speech before school aged children and was accused of attempting to indoctrinate them with his “socialist ideology”: stay in school and work hard. Children, it seems, are especially susceptible to the siren song of presidential eloquence and need to be protected. Since then I’ve taken notice of the fact that children—much like animals—appear to show up more or less randomly in lots of the “pictures of the day” slide shows one finds on the websites of most national newspapers. What I mean by “randomly” is that such images oftentimes seem to have no direct connection to stories or events otherwise being reported. And yet it happens so regularly that it seems reasonable to assume that something is being communicated. But what? Consider three images that showed up this past week at the Wall Street Journal.

Here we have a mother and her son dressed up in super hero costumes for the “Big Apple Comic-Con.” If you don’t know what that is, well, neither do I, and there is nothing in the WSJ that gives us a clue. And it is probably besides the point anyway. But what is the point? The picture seems to lack any real drama. The costumes seem altogether out of place—notice that no one around them seems to be in costume—and thus direct attention to the one thing that stands out: facial expressions. The mother, whose face is partially veiled by glasses and hair, smiles possessively at her child who in turn stares at the camera with what can only be described as a measure of both skepticism and resignation.

A second picture offers a point of comparison.

The photograph is of a “tribal family” fleeing a military attack against militants in South Waziristan, as they approach a checkpoint near Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan. There is a bit more context here as the military assault against the Taliban leading to over 100,000 refugees was actually covered in the paper, but the affective meaning of the image itself is hard to read. All of the adults are women and their faces are veiled according to the local custom. What draws our attention once again is the face of a child, and once again the child bears the countenance of skepticism and resignation. The difference here, of course, is that the child is not looking directly at the camera—more in the manner of an offer than a demand—even as his countenance seems channeled by the goat in the lower right of the frame who does appear to be looking directly at the viewer.

A third photograph of a mother and her child walking past a pile of debris left by a series of storms in the Philippines provides an additional point of comparison.

Here, the scene is overwhelmed by what appears to be a mountain of rubble. Once again the face of the adult is veiled as our attention is directed to the face of child which channels the affect of the image. Once again that affect is difficult to read. It doesn’t quite seem to repeat the resignation of the first two images, but there does seem to be evoke a sense of discernment as something in the pile has captured his attention, even if he is not so concerned about it that he seems likely to disconnect from his mother and seek it out

I’m not entirely sure what to make out of this collection of photographs, but even though they are separated from one another in the slide show by other unrelated images, it is hard not to see some point of consonance. There is a degree to which the photographs animate a “Family of Man” sensibility as they direct us to something like the fundamental humanity of children from all around the world—New York, Pakistan, and the Philippines. But there seems to be something more going on here as well, as the affective force of each image emanates from the face and facial expression of a child that belies the presumption of their childlike innocence and intellectual naiveté in a way that suggests that children may be a bit more savvy than some think.

“Out of the mouths of babes” is an old proverb that reminds us that children are capable of knowing far more than we can imagine they know. Perhaps here we have something like the visual complement to that old saying that invites us to see the acumen that even the youngest of children can bring to the world.

Photo Credits: Natalie Behring/Reuters; Ishtiaq Mahsud/AP; Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

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Many of the more popular spectator sports involve athletes excelling at games the fans play not as well.  Only a very few can go pro, but lots of people can shoot a basket, throw a football, catch a baseball, defend the goal, or sink a putt.  And then there is gymnastics.

Not only is this athlete doing what you see here, but she is doing it while leaping on a balance beam.  Maybe you might try to jump high into the air and land again on a hard surface that is four inches wide and four feet off the floor, but not me.   Nor am I likely to do a poor back flip with a full twist vault, or a not so good iron cross.   Without years of highly disciplined training, the level of difficulty is way beyond anything to be attempted by a weekend warrior.

But I digress.  Perhaps by now the shock of the photograph above is being to wear off.  There is something horrifying about decapitation, even when we know that the severing is an illusion.  A trick of the camera, an accident of angle, we know intuitively that the head is merely out of our line of sight.  And yet.  The body works so well without it, the musculature is so perfectly developed and disciplined, it could almost double as a science fiction athlete in a future where everything has been genetically engineered for optimal performance, with all other aesthetic and moral values cut away as well.

The photograph may be showing us a glimpse of the future, but it also reveals thing or two about the present.  Genetics aside, the athlete has been engineered for optimal performance, and so the image reveals the extraordinary specialization that goes into the higher echelons of modern sport–and other sectors of modern society.  It also might hint at some of the costs for the individual athlete, who often sacrifices educational opportunities and much else in the short term while enduring chronic physical discomfort or worse later in life.

I think it also reveals a deeper condition that is intertwined with our visual experience.  The obvious distortion in the visual image (the fictive decapitation) exposes the actual distortion of the body that occurs in many forms of training.  Although images of athletes have been used since Greek antiquity to portray the Body Beautiful as a perfect expression of the natural physique, in fact, sport, like art of any sort, involves doing things that are not simply natural.  Excellence in any cultural activity involves making the unusual so ingrained that it seems to be second nature.  The athlete or artist or other performer takes what is arbitrary, contingent, artificial, and otherwise a matter of of choice and effort, and fashions it into an seemingly effortless act.

Our sense of beauty can beguile us on this point, and many photographs of gymnasts and other athletes may serve that denial of how strange, contorted, and otherwise artificial our use of our bodies can be as people dance, paint, do surgery, build houses, or sit at a computer and write.  Nothing we do can be contrary to the laws of nature or our body’s inherent incapacities, but as we live in cultures of bodily discipline we learn to function as bodies without heads, heads without bodies, and many other equally odd designs.

What people don’t do, however, is develop a sense of their bodies as plastic material waiting to be formed and reformed under pressure.  In fact, one use of both images and mirrors seems to be to maintain a sense of a proportionate bodily integrity.  Which is why I am closing with this photograph:

The intact body is visible, but there still is something wrong.  Now it seems that the athlete has become compressed by the powerful gravitational forces built up when torquing around the bar.  The body is still  trained and controlled, and one once again knows intuitively that the foreshortening is a visual trick and not the actual crushing of the body to produce the world’s shortest woman, and yet. . . . Second nature is again exposed: the body’s innate capabilities have been transformed into s specific and astonishing art, one that dazzles the mind.  If you think about what is being revealed, however, you might realize that artistic excellence depends upon deformation, and that because it is a product of culture, the human being has no fixed form.

Photographs by Carl de Souza/AFP-Getty Images and Toby Melville/Reuters from the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships 2009 in London.

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The full title of this post could be Face/Paint Kitsch/Art Look/See Now/Then Pleasure/Pain Again.  If that isn’t perfectly clear, I’m not surprised.  The story starts here:

The photograph is of a soccer fan from Ghana painted for a World Cup qualifying match.  We see the bright colors and his intense expression simultaneously.  The image is vivid, striking, both festive and elemental, and it reverberates with shock, surprise, and dismay without registering any one of those reactions with any certainty.  Whatever he actually was feeling, there is no doubt that this was a moment of intensity.  You can see why it would jump out of the thousands of thunbnail images on a photo-editor’s desktop.

For all that, the photo also is thoroughly conventional. The slide shows at the major papers are full of such images throughout the various carnival seasons–and if the news is slow otherwise, there always seems to be a carnival somewhere.  Hindu holy men, Russian street performers, Brazilian revelers, American kids at a state fair–wherever vernacular life meets art, someone’s face is going to be painted.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and journalism and art and all of culture are at bottom repetitive.  This photograph is good of kind, and I would have left it there but for one problem: Not long after I saw it, I came across this photograph:

This self-portrait of Andy Warhol in drag presents another painted face, and the difference between kitsch and art. I generally avoid that distinction, which I see as one of modernism’s least impressive and most overused ideas, and I don’t want to demean the first photograph, which suffers by being put into this unusual comparison. But, my God, what a difference between the two images.

As before, we see the expressive face and the artificial colors simultaneously.  Instead of the momentary frenzy of a sporting event, however, we see a lifetime of pain.  Instead of intensity (alone), here the paint (and wig) ironically evoke the powerful imprint of duration.  As in, I’ve always been this way, always had to carry this inside, always. Although still a striking incongruity, the juxtaposition of male face and female makeup fuses into something that is at once the facial mask of a social type and the naked revelation of an individual soul.

But who’s soul?  The power of Warhol’s photograph comes in part from the realization that you could be seeing one of the many gay men who have been crushed in the closet, or one of the many transgender individuals who feel trapped in their body, or one of the  many women who also have become fused to a mask of silver hair and red lips that promised happiness but is good only to put a face on their suffering.  Because the photo was taken with a Polaroid, there is a hint of pleasure betrayed (just as in the first image above), and a blurring of the line between high and low media (and so of art and kitsch) in order to evoke a common experience.  Although a remarkable work of art, the image is still a photograph, and so it reminds us that what it shows does not happen only once.  Whether the image portrays the individual artist or a social type, we are seeing pain that has occurred again and again.

Photographs by Julian Finney/FIFA-Getty and Andy Warhol/The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.  The photograph is on display as part of the exhibition Polaroid: Exp. 09.10.09 at the Atlas Gallery, London.

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