The Visual Cultures of Childhood

Some of the most iconic images of the twentieth century are of children: Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, depicting farm worker Frances Owens Thompson with three of her children; six-year-old Ruby Bridges, flanked by U.S. marshals, walking down the steps of an all-white elementary school she desegregated; Hu?nh Công Út's photograph of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a South Vietnamese napalm bombing. These iconic images with their juxtaposition of the innocent (in the sense of not culpable) figure of the child and the guilty perpetrators of violence (both structural and interpersonal) are 'arresting'. The power of the image of the child to arrest the spectator, to demand a response from her has given the representation of children a central place in the history of visual culture for social reform. This book analyses a range of forms and genres from social reform documentary through feature films and onto small and mobile media to address two core questions: What difference does it make to the message who the producer is? and How has the place of children and youth changed in visual public culture?

Karen Wells is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography, Birkbeck, University of London.

1. Visual Political Culture, Childhood and Youth: From Object to Subject to Activist
2. The Emergence of a Sentimental Visual Culture
3. 'And Then the Kids Took it Over': Documentary Film, Racism and the Civil Rights Movement
4. The Melodrama of Being a Child: NGO Representations of Poverty
5. 'You Need to be Glad That You Graduated from High School, and That You're Alive at Eighteen': Coming-Of-Age in Black Film
6. We've Got a Bright Place in the Sun: LGBTQ Coming Out and Teen Melodrama
7. 'I'd Be Lost Without the Weight of You Two on My Back': Working Class Teens and the Western
8. 'On Being the Representation'
9. 'We the Wounded': Violence and Citizenship
10. Theorising Childhood, Visual Culture, and Technology