Childhood
Photography quickly learned to capture those childhood moments and images which epitomise what it is to be a child. The newest method of artistic expression during the late 19th century, the photographic image, mechanical and trivial according to Baudelaire, had great difficulty finding its place within the art world. Defenders of pictorial aesthetics would surround the child's face and body with pictorial effects that mark the genre. This would later be talked about, for this photographic form that was still unaware of its own realism, as a childhood illness.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Charles-Augustin Lhermitte produced images of naked preadolescent girls surrounded by a golden halo.. This may have been innocent nudism tinged with Edenism, but would such photographs portraying naked children be possible today without provoking a scandal?
Some decades later, the photographic style labelled "humanist" would put children in situations that highlighted the comical aspects of everyday life. But this cheerful photography could not hide the weight of the political and social situation of the time: children at work rather than in the classroom, the revolutionary ideology of Rodtchenko, in which the coming of the new child must logically precede the coming of the new man. There was also the racist and deadly doctrine under the Nazi regime, which saw in a Jewish child the beginning of an evil to be eradicated.
Using childhood, which is by definition transitory, as its subject, photography has been able to capture a full range of conditions, from innocence to injustice, from play, to laughter and to melancholy.
