Art Photography or made by a Seven year old?
On a trip back to stay with my family in March, my Mom handed me a photo-album she had come across. It immediately jarred my memory. Inside were photographs I had made as a seven year old, mostly dating from the month of August in 1991—the month and year written on the back of each print by my Mom.
The photographs were made using a gray, water resistant, 35mm point and shoot camera with a built-in flash, bright yellow trim and a big yellow shutter button, called the “Le Clic Tuff 35.” What a great name for a camera.
I remember receiving it as a gift and being psyched. It was given to me for my seventh birthday that previous month. The film I used my Mom would purchase and have sent out for development from the family pharmacy she worked at down the street from our house. My Mom was the photographer of the family and was the first person to foster my curiosity in the medium. For a while in high school, I borrowed her Minolta XG-E SLR, which really got the ball rolling.
The content of the photographs I made with the “Le Clic Tuff 35” were of a pretty normal subject matter for a kid: mostly my immediate family, my best friend who lived up the street, family pets, the back of a Toyota Camry station wagon and family outings, which in the summer of 1991 looked like a trip up to the Poconos, swimming and fishing at the Randolph lake, visiting extended family in Jersey City, family friends down the shore and old neighbors in Belleville, as well as an early fall trip up to see a college football game in West Point. What an awesome summer. I still get uneasy when summer comes to an end and it is no wonder why. The magic of childhood summers were hard to give up in exchange for going back to school.
In addition to the listed subject matter, I also had a number of photographs paying homage to the great Don Mattingly, first basemen of the New York Yankees and my favorite player as a kid. In addition to the back of my Mom's Mattingly t-shirt, I also posed Don Mattingly figurines in my room, believing the photos would look just like the baseball cards. With no understanding of focal length, lighting or how photography works at all, the stupidly blurry images were a huge disappointment.
While looking over the photographs, I started to notice how weird and kind of aesthetically bizarre some of these snapshots were. They were taken from unusual angles, especially the portraits, because I was short. The harsh flat flash in the daytime created some interesting fill light, while in darker settings, it overexposed and isolated the subjects with only hints of a background. The pharmacy grade color film created muted and not always natural tones. I cut off heads and limbs, because I framed things poorly and the foreground content was often out of focus, because I shot less than a foot from my subject while the minimal focal length, I'm sure, was at least three feet. When I did frame subjects with intention, it was cartoon-ishly two-dimensional. I even took some rudimentary “street” scenes, though the subject I was actually photographing was a dog that someone was walking...way too far from where I was standing with my camera.
Now all of these shortcomings should have made for objectively terrible photographs (which they generally are), but if one is an admirer of the marvelous and curious world of “documentary art photography,” they may see these in a different light. A decade plus more before learning of great boundary breaking photographers like Mark Cohen, Nan Goldin, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Paul Strand, William Eggelston or Diane Arbus, my seven year old eye was unintentionally doing its damnedest to make its own crude renditions utilizing some of the stylistic tenants of their work. (Some of the very same tenants would be exploited by the commercial photography industry to achieve that 'hipster aesthetic' of the mid 2000's and unfortunately, has yet to run itself out.)
Obviously...I am joking around and it is kind of asinine to even compare my childhood photographs in jest to the work of the great photographers mentioned, who I very much revere.
But there is something to be said about the approach to photography done by a child, which I believe many photographers often still wish they could summon in themselves; inspiration is everywhere and it is tackled by a fresh and lawless framing of the world. Attempts to achieve the same raw spirit— trying to put “new eyes” on a world one has become accustomed to interpreting in a certain way— as an adult versed in the medium, can be a difficult task. The same can be said for inspiration. I think every adult artist at some point hits a wall and questions, “why am I making this at all?” As opposed to a child, where their unique approach is natural and all they know, and their eyes are not metaphorically “new,” they are actually new to observing the world around them. But at the same time, the results are usually terrible.
And maybe only half jokingly, I am not really sure I have gotten any better as a photographer in the last 31 years.
