Two seperate worlds

04 May Two seperate worlds

On photographing the children of the square, parents often want an image of their child. Where the subject is the same small individual, the expectation of what that image should look like is totally different to my expectation; “Yes, but can I have a picture of her smiling? They all look rather serious… And she has a dirty face.”

It confronts me with my own expectation too: I feel I am influenced by (Magnum) photographers like Larry Towel, Mary Ellen Mark and Henri Cartier Bresson – I feel I am looking for a certain raw element in the children, stripping away luxury and sifting out what I feel to be pure emotions. I tend to avoid specific anecdotes and look for the timeless, universal emotions or actions that are shared by all the children. But to every individual little person unique and personaly valuable.
And so the internal movements of the growing children gain experience and slowly gather the basics for maturity.

The contrast in what we look for in the face of these little people is huge; they are two completely separate worlds, different visual languages that abide to different sets of rules, a different vocabulary. And still, we have to work together.