Julie Blackmon, Jill Greenberg, and Ruud van Empel photograph children, creating fictional images that elicit reactions ranging from amusement to astonishment to shock. While photography of children is as old as the medium itself, the works in this exhibition represent a recent approach aided by digital techniques. Each of these artists uses digital techniques to separate photography from its associations with reality. Blackmon collages elements and Greenberg draws on the images. Van Empel uses the most elaborate techniques, building his images element by element and often compiling more than 100 individual elements in a single image. Extending the late-twentieth-century movement toward “fabricated” imagery, they shift photography further and further away from its association with reality.

Julie Blackmon photographs her extended family in their homes in Springfield, Missouri, creating humorous vignettes of family life that are staged and collaged, and as such, both fictional and autobiographic. Gathered together under the title Domestic Vacations, her photographs present a wholesome Rockwellian view of domestic life that is markedly American and middle class, sometimes fanciful, and occasionally surreal. Her compositions range from simple and iconic to inconceivably complex; as one critic said of the latter, “[they are] photos that ask us to consider how many unsettling things can happen at the same time in the same place without anyone ever taking notice.” In the artist’s words, they investigate “the stress, the chaos, and the need to simultaneously connect and escape” family life.
 
Jill Greenberg’s End Times is an arresting series of photographs of children crying. Taken in her studio in Los Angeles, the images capture emotions that are seldom documented on film: the unadulterated rage, fear, and sadness of young children who, not yet socialized, give themselves over totally to the experience. Greenberg began the series when a little boy burst into tears during a photo session. She continued shooting. This was in 2005, just after the presidential elections, and the boy’s despair reminded Greenberg of her own feelings about social and political events. She called that first image Four More Years. Other titles refer to political misdeeds—Torture, Cover Up, Misinformation, and Deniability—or to the Evangelical right—Left Behind, Rapture Index, Armageddon. The images are both fascinating and painful. The theatricality of the photographs removes them from reality and provides an opportunity to observe strong emotion free from responsibility, from our instinct to soothe and calm children and to protect them from harm. Greenberg reinvigorates our concern by associating these images with her personal and political fears. “As a parent I have to reckon with the knowledge that our children will suffer for the mistakes our government is making. Their pain is a precursor of what is to come.”  

Ruud van Empel pictures children surrounded by nature: white children in northern deciduous forests and black children in tropical forests. His beautiful and simultaneously odd images are, foremost, a contemplation of innocence, informed by nostalgic yearnings.  Referencing family snapshots taken by his father in the 1960s, van Empel dresses his models in clothing from the period and mimics the frontal pose of communion and graduation pictures. By transposing the environs from urban to natural settings, van Empel connects children to Nature, to Eden, and ultimately to innocence. The series takes on further social significance when Van Empel photographs black children and emphasizes the blackness of their skin in the printing process. He calls this series of images World. The title emphasizes the universality of the subject and identifying these children as belonging to all of us. This utopian attitude runs counter to a history of slavery and discrimination; readings of the images, therefore, fluctuate between an embrace of the concept of childhood innocence and a critique of racial relationships.