"All I wanted was to grow up in peace, deal with my bodily changes and these pesky new zits without it being recorded. But my mother was omnipresent, her phone an extension of her arm … every little moment was mined for content."

Writes Shari Franke, "The House of My Mother," quoted in "Is It Abusive to Make Art About Your Children? It’s not quite #MeToo, but a spate of new memoirs is forcing a reckoning on what consent means when your parent is the artist" (NYT).

Shari Franke is the daughter of "mommy vlogger" Ruby Franke, who was ultimately convicted of child abuse. The article also discusses Sally Mann, the photographer we talked about a couple days ago, here.

Mann has her own memoir, in which she concedes, “I wanted attention for the work and the easiest way to get it was obviously to put forward the most attention-grabbing imagery.... To be an artist means you must declare a loyalty to your art form and your vision that runs deeper than almost any other, even sometimes deeper than blood kinship.... When I stepped behind the camera, and they stepped in front of it, I was a photographer, and they were actors and we were making a photograph."

There's this quote from Molly Jong-Fast: "In [my mother's] view, she did spend time with me — in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there. I may have felt that she was slightly allergic to me, but to her, she was spending time with the most important version of me."

By the way, did you know "Christopher Robin Milne resented his father’s use of his likeness in the Winnie the Pooh stories, and Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for 'Peter Pan,' seemed to live in a permanent state of rage at being associated with the character."

The article is by Parul Sehgal, who writes: "If the child’s perspective goes unacknowledged, and their compliance confused for collaboration, it might be because our focus has so often been elsewhere — on the needs and rights of the artist-parent, on the struggle to have domestic life and, specifically, motherhood, accepted as a subject worthy of study."

That feminist issue has overshadowed the childist perspective. Is "childist" even a word? Actually, yes, but this is the first time I'm thinking of it, and I had to check to see that I wasn't coining it.

"In January, the Texas police entered a group exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth that featured [Sally] Mann, and they seized several photos from the 'Immediate Family' series..."

"... her landmark monograph of their three preadolescent children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia — in which the children appear nude. (None is more graphic than your average Christ child of the Italian Renaissance.) The police were prepared to bring charges of child pornography against the museum, even sending officers on a (broadly discredited) investigation of art museums in New York, according to the Fort Worth Report. A grand jury declined to bring it to trial, and Mann’s photos were later returned to Gagosian, her gallery. But to the artist and many journalists, the seizure seemed to bring a belated, QAnon-era fruition to the allegations of child exploitation that Mann has weathered since unveiling the photos in the 1990s..."

From "Sally Mann, in Her Golden Hour, Faces Fresh Culture Wars/One of America’s finest memoirists, in photos and in prose, is at the peak of her powers in 'Art Work'— and wondering if her pictures will survive" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see some of her photos, not the seized photos, and read the whole story).

"In her attic, Mann stared at a stack of the 150 unexhibited 'Black Men' prints, wrapped in opaque plastic. Downstairs, we clicked through scans of them: forearms, backs, hands folded, prayerlike. A photograph is two things, Roland Barthes said: what it says to the world and what it says to you. Mann has found herself hounded by that first way of seeing.

"For all the righteous concern people expressed about the welfare of my children, what most of them failed to understand was that taking those pictures was an act separate from mothering."

"When I stepped behind the camera and my kids stepped in front of it, I was a photographer and they were actors, and we were making a photograph together. And in a similar vein, many people mistook the photographs for reality or attributed qualities to my children (one letter-­writer called them 'mean') based on the way they looked in the pictures. The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph. Even the children understood this distinction...."

Writes Sally Mann, whose very arty photographs of her (sometimes naked) children were published to much elite acclaim in 1992 and — simultaneously — intense criticism as “manipulative,” “sick,” “twisted,” “vulgar” — in part because of what Mann calls the "cosmically bad timing" of coinciding with the controversy about Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Mapplethorpe had "included images of children along with sadomasochistic and homoerotic imagery," and: "Into this turbulent climate, I had put forth my family pictures."

From the comments there (at the NYT):

There is absolutely no question that Sally Mann is a photographic artist of great stature. There is also no question that were she not, she would have had her children taken from the home decades ago, and probably would have been jailed. If the father down the block from Mann took similar photos and made them public, he would have been thrown under the jail house. She was, and remains, ethically tone deaf - at best. To use one's children, who cannot possibly understand the ramifications of what they are doing, as one's subjects to create sexually charged images, is the grossest violation of the concept of informed consent. and is inexcusable.