Ambiguity, Children, Representation, And Sexuality (Essay‪)‬

The 1972 photographic album Victorian Children by Graham Ovenden and Robert Melville contains more than one hundred photographs of children taken in the Victorian era, most of them girls. Some are by recognized photographers, including Charles Dodgson and Julia Margaret Cameron. Others are by unknown photographers. The images in the book are familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in Victorian art and photography. Children are arranged in classical poses, dressed as character types, and posed as if caught in reveries. In a typical sequence, a girl of five undresses for her bath; in another image captioned "Commencing Young," a young boy and girl kiss. To the modern eye there is something unsettling about the coquettish gaze with which the little girls so often fix the camera. It is an unease which is only reinforced by author Robert Melville's comment in his preface. He writes: "Call it the little girl syndrome if you must, but in the matter of the subject that claims this album I think Proust should have the last word: 'It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for, when the body is fixed in an immobility which holds no fresh surprises in store ... it is so short, that radiant morning time that one comes to like only the very youngest girls, those in whom the flesh, like a precious leaven, is still at work'" (Ovenden and Melville n.p.). The most disturbing images in the book, however, are the ones the reader cannot see. Plates 41 to 50 have been carefully removed. And it is only when you read the introductory essay that you are given a clue as to why. Melville tells us that these images are of child prostitutes and that they include a portrait of a pregnant ten year old and of two young girls engaging in sex while a woman looks on holding a whip. He writes: "more sinister trespassers have left their marks on this album of little girls. The invisible presence of pimps, brothel keepers and respectable gentleman hoping to slake their thirst for virgins in narrow vaginas dominates the group" (Ovenden and Melville n.p.). Being unable to view these images does not lessen the apprehension this description creates. On the contrary, their absence opens up a kind of void in which images proliferate; their invisibility makes them, in a perverse sense, hyper-visible. The missing images haunt the book, leaving their trace across the photographs that remain. These absent images symbolize a broader truth about child pornography. Child pornography, in most legal systems, refers to an occult category of media texts--to texts that are produced and exchanged in the most covert of environments. It's material whose content is unambiguous but whose form can only be imagined by the general public.