Children seen, and heard
Children should be seen and not heard.” An all too familiar repressive declaration, this view was spawned in the Victorian Age, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in which children of the poor were used as slave labour, while those of the wealthy, their fates assigned by gender, were raised to be the agents of a supremacist empire.
That children today remain the victims of power, indentured labour and sexual slavery, reafdeclare firms the dark heart of this cliché — children must not and cannot be heard for fear that they will reveal the perverse core of our familial, educative, global-corporate core in which children, in one way or another, are systemically wronged.
Better that they be seen, then, and not heard. And in this light perhaps photography, an optic that can further fix a child, objectify him or her, just might be yet another means through which their presence can be controlled.
Emblematic of that most avidly sought-after elixir — youth — children are reminders of our lost past, our supposed innocence, which perhaps is why they are despised all the more, and why we, the gerontocratic despisers of the free will of children, also inaccurately that “youth is wasted on the young”.
What then, given this soulless oppression of children in societies worldwide, are we to make of Pieter Hugo’s photographic reading, because, of course, no photograph is innocent, and neither is its subject — in this case a grouping of children from SA and Rwanda.
On entering the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town one is struck immediately by the austere sumptuousness of the space — the gallery is cavernous, allowing a photographic work room to breathe. And the scale of each work, beaded with a pale wood, possesses a complementary scale. The children, therefore, emerge on a human scale, they accompany us, watch us as we silently absorb their presence. For, of course, galleries too are sanctums, zones of silence, where the sacred and the profane commingle.
One is immediately struck by the fact that the photographs are staged, set up. But this is not truly surprising given that Hugo has always showcased his yen for choreography — and here Hugo’s brilliant Nollywood series is a striking case in point. One notices in his children not only the postures, or poses, some awkward, as though the child were rearranged like any other prosthetic, but also the