Loretta Lux: Lovely or Lost Children

Images of children can be creepy. I’m thinking of the old black and white Victorian era portraits, the Renaissance paintings where little children are gussied up like small adults and stare out at you with unfamiliar eyes.

I think that’s what I find most creepy about the work of photographer Loretta Lux; the eyes.

Boy in a blue raincoat 2
2001

Lux was born in Dresden, Germany in 1969. She has gained international acclaim for her photographs and earned the Infinity Award for Art from the International Center of Photography in 2005.

The Boy
2001

You may have guessed that digital editing plays a large roll in Lux’s art-making process. Lux was formally trained as a painter, and her work reminds me a little bit of Brooke Shaden in that way. It feels a little bit like digital printmaking or digital painting or a hybrid of the two. Lux doesn’t want to expose her digital process to the public, in order to ‘protect her work’. (From others attempting to the same thing? From others qualifying her work based on the amount of editing she does to each image?) Yet, viewers and critics appear to be a bit obsessed with figuring out just how she does it.

“Photographers can’t help but wonders, when they look at Loretta Lux’s portraits of children, what digital legerdemain she uses to create them. One member of a popular online photography forum has even deconstructed Lux’s presumed Photoshop technique on his own computer, determining it to be a judiciously applied combination of Gaussian Blur, unsharp masking, and use of the Levels control to give the children and their settings a distinctive pallor.” (Russell Hart for American Photo) (Also, see Time Magazine article, Loretta Lux)

The Rose Garden
2001

This only supports the question I have been pondering over – just how much does digital processing impact how we value art? Digital processing has made its way into a vast majority of art forms. Printmaking, painting, photography, obviously graphic design. We, as artists, viewers and critics need to consider how technology is changing the way we create art and thus should change how we think about and qualify art.

The Bride 2003

Children have been subjects of art for ever and anon. Yet, I think many people get a bit uncomfortable when they see children represented in work that is anything other than idealized childhood “appropriate”. Frieze Magazine published a particularly critical article on the artist’s work. The subjects of Lux’s work range from 2 to 12 years old. Are they “lost in a day dream [or]… more remote than the most withdrawn real-world child”? (Hart)

Study of A Boy 3
2002

Through her editing process, Lux removes the background of the photograph and replaces it with an empty or practically empty space. This removed the children from their backgrounds, from their context. I see these children as little adults. They don’t seem to have much agency of their own. The viewer places themselves in the children. “For one New York collector who bought the image: ‘It evokes a universal solitary quest out of a mere child'”. (the telegraph 2005) Perhaps this is why some viewers find such discomfort in the images. “…a series of lush, unsettling images of children…reminiscent of work by Balthus, famous for his paintings of very young girls in languid, suggestive poses…”

“At times Lux’s images call to mind the discomfiting photographs of young girls taken by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), but thankfully she allows her subjects their isolation and, one assumes, their own sexuality, hidden deep beneath the work’s milky surfaces.” (Kristin Jones for Frieze Magazine)

Are these images really erotic? I certainly didn’t think so. Particularly since the work most in question is The Wanderer 2003

The Wanderer
2003

“The eyes are haunting, mysterious, set into the ambiguity and androgyny of the anonymous figures” (Nola Tully for the New York Sun, 2005)

Perhaps it’s this androgyny that is so uncomfortable, that heightens an awareness of a lack of gender and brings to mind our social conceptions of sexuality.

Study of A Girl
2002

“Children are fascinating subjects for me. An artist picks a subject that he likes, so I picked children because that is what I can most connect with. But my work is not about the children I photograph. It’s not children’s portraits or portraits in a traditional sense. I don’t try to capture the models individual psychology. I treat them as a metaphor for childhood and for innocence.” (Lux)

The Drummer