LINCOLN - A very basic, and fascinating, opposition drives "Presumed Innocence: Photographic Perspectives of Children." It's between photography itself, an arresting of time, and childhood, an unfolding of time. Tension between form and content doesn't get any more fundamental than that.
It's uncertain, for example, whether the two figures wearing Halloween masks in Nicholas Prior's eerie exterior "Untitled, #44," from 2003, are the parents of the little girl on the left, or her siblings, or possibly even passersby. What's absolutely clear - the viewer doesn't need to consciously take it in, the recognition is completely instinctive - is that the little girl is a lot less little now. Or there's the otherwise quite-mundane sight of the two children in Arthur Leipzig's "Ideal Laundry." It's so unnerving because, seen behind the plate glass window of the storefront, they look like museum specimens, imprisoned in their own youth. Has time's passing passed them by?
The one major criticism to lodge against the show, which runs at the DeCordova Museum through April 27, is the misleading coyness of its ti tle. "Presumed Innocence" may be an attention-getting pun, but it indicates a focus on knowingness and experience among the young. There is that, yes - how could there not be? "Presumed Innocence" includes six Sally Mann pictures, a Tierney Gearon, and note the juxtaposition of savored cigarette and licked lollipop in Mark Cohen's "Untitled (Boy in Yellow Shirt Smoking)" - but the great strength of the exhibition is its refusing to cram into any one category such a vast, barrier-ignoring concept as "childhood." The subtitle, while admittedly flat, gives a far more accurate sense of this large and vigorously varied exhibition.
To get a sense of how varied consider Chan Chao's "Two Novice Monks" and Gosta Peterson's "Cub Scouts and Young Girls in Courreges Outfits for The
The show's contents, 114 photographs and one video, sprawl over three floors. They come from the holdings of the local collectors Anthony and Beth Terrana. The Terranas' tastes are eclectic. The photographs are about evenly divided between color and black and white. Images date to the turn of the last century - a ravishing Heinrich Kuhn gum pigment print, from 1904; Lewis Hine's heartbreaking "Tenement Child, Handicapped in Every Way, Chicago," from 1907. The vast preponderance, though, are from the past few decades.
There are famous names (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastiao Salgado, Elliot Erwitt). There are famous names no one ever associates with children (Ansel Adams? Weegee?!). There are famous images by very famous names: Diane Arbus' "Twins," Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," Robert Frank's "Trolley - New Orleans."
Yet encountering the famous images out of their standard greatest-hits context, one sees them afresh. The Lange is surely the single most famous art photograph of the 20th century. Thanks to its name, Lange's composition, and the subject's amazing, Rushmore-worthy gaze, the viewer's focus is always on the mother. Seeing the image in "Presumed Innocence," one notices with a start the baby in her lap and older children flanking her. As for the Frank, race dominates it - those two African-Americans seated (where else?) in back - but at the DeCordova one realizes that right at the center of the picture are two children.
"Presumed Innocence" lets us see familiar images afresh. More important, it also lets us see images of childhood afresh. Such photographs don't qualify as a genre, but they're certainly a category. Too often, that category is dismissable as a sump of adorability (presumed and otherwise). The DeCordova avoids that temptation. The only real cuteness-alert offender here is Alfred Eisenstaedt's "Children at a Puppet Theater II," and, yes, it really is adorable.
The great artistic renderings of childhood - the short stories of Flannery O'Connor, say, or the court portraits of Velasquez - never let us forget that adorability is, at best, a single element in a far greater complexity. Children are not smaller adults. Although they belong to the same species as grown-ups, they are very different creatures. The most unsettling images here, like Mary Ellen Mark's "Young Street Prostitute Crying in Olympia Cafe," lie along the fault line between the worlds of childhood and adult.
The great flaw in the work of such photographers as Mann and Gearon who represent childhood transgressively is that it treats that fault line as if it were a revolving door. So much of the shock value of their work springs from how it relentlessly simplifies. Emphasizing unclothed skin or provocative pose or knowing look portrays children in banally adult terms. (The incongruity of such images, which is where the shock value comes from, is simply banality with a smirk.) The problem isn't that their images are exploitative. They're not, and that would be true even if Mann's and Gearon's subjects were other than their own children (it's not as if the kids care). The problem is that they're so reductive.
Just because children are less experienced than adults doesn't make them any less complicated. It takes no more than a glance at the young boy in Antanas Sutkus' "Pioneer" to register that an unplumbable world lies within his grave, pallid, humpty-dumpty head.
A similar gravity is evident in the two photographs here by Loretta Lux, "The Irish Girls," and "The Blue Dress." What's striking about them - and makes them anomalous in the context of "Presumed Innocence" - is the way their young subjects seem so incidental to the pictures. They're not about children; they're formalist color studies. What's most appealing to Lux about her young sitters is the way in which pearly skin tones blend into off-ivory background (in the one) or how the clean lines of a young girl's torso let the shade of fabric she's wearing chime all the more clearly with the rectangles of blue on the building behind her. Lux would agree that children are not smaller adults. What they are, she'd say, is smaller mannequins.
(Fortunately, there are no mannequins, figurative or otherwise, in the smaller show of images of children, 39 in all, drawn from the DeCordova's permanent collection, which accompanies "Presumed Innocence." There's an Edward Steichen, several images from Charles "Teenie" Harris, who had a memorable show at Gallery Kayafas late last year, and such eminent local photographers - which is to say, really good photographers who happen to live around here - as Jules Aarons and Nicholas Nixon. Nixon also has work in "Presumed Innocence.")
A distinguishing aspect of childhood is that it's never discrete. Adults can, at least in theory, fend for themselves. Kids can't. Angela Strassheim's "Untitled (Father and Son)" and "Untitled (Waiting Room)" capture the parent-child relationship in unexpected ways: a father combing a son's hair, another father serving as upright mattress for sleeping daughter. Parents are only part of the childhood constellation of connection. There are siblings, friends, pets, possessions. The importance of the last should not be underestimated. Julie Blackmon's "Gum" is photograph as catalog: clothes, luggage, dolls, other toys, even a gold curtain behind which their young owner hides. Throughout "Presumed Innocence," there is the importance of props: masks, cigarettes, costumes. So much of growing up, the pursuit of the appearance of adulthood, is the taking on of the appurtenances of adulthood.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
