Where Children Sleep: Photography and the Child in Need
One Friday afternoon in February 2023, I attended an exhibition opening at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut. Given my interests—in the built environment, in the history of childhood, and in the intersections of these topics—I was eager to see Where Children Sleep, a selection of images by Venice-based photographer James Mollison. Although I had seen thumbnail pictures on the invitation to the opening, I was unprepared for my experience in the galleries. The walls were dark, the images were big, and the youngsters in the studio portraits met my gaze with somber expressions. I was awed by the way these kids, some as young as four, commanded the space with their quiet presence. Initially commissioned by Save the Children (Italy), published in book form in 2010, and circulated widely since then as a traveling exhibition, Where Children Sleep is a powerfully beautiful meditation on the nature of childhood in the twenty-first century and on the ways in which global inequality touches young lives.
Mollison’s starting point (according to a TEDx Talk he gave in 2011) was to reflect on images often used in humanitarian appeals—“children emotively smiling at you or pleading with their eyes”—images that left him with the feeling that he really did not understand much about the youngsters’ lives. Recalling his own childhood bedroom as the space that communicated the most about his younger self, he set out make pictures of children and their bedrooms. In his telling, he quickly recognized only some children have bedrooms of their own and so recast the project as an exploration of a more inclusive subject: where children sleep.
Mollison is not the first photographer to turn their attention to the topic. Progressive-era photographers took many such images. In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis included pictures of children and their parents sitting in beds crammed into the kitchens of their tenement apartments; children in the Five Points House of Industry kneeling in prayer at the foot of their bed; and so-called Street Arabs in their “sleeping quarters,” that is, in areaways, on the stoops of buildings, or in church corners (Figure 1). Riis intended his images to shock his middle-class readers, whose worldview hinged on the belief that children were fundamentally different from adults; that childhood deserved to be protected, nurtured, and playful; that a child’s education should be centered on mental, emotional, and physical development; and that clothes, toys, and even child-sized furniture were essential to translate this ideal of childhood into lived experience.[1] To be sure, his audience accepted that the ability to provide many of the material trappings of a good childhood would remain beyond the reach of the poor, but to see innocent children so degraded would be, or so Riis hoped, too much. His readers would have to act.
Figure 1. Jacob Riis, “Street Arabs in sleeping quarters [areaway, Mulberry Street],” How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890; reprint of 1901 edition New York: Dover, 1971), 159.
If Mollison builds on this tradition of reform photography, he also takes it in a strikingly new direction, thanks in large part to his reliance on what he calls “the typological method.” Akin to what architectural historians do in analyses of building typologies, the approach depends on assembling and juxtaposing multiple examples of the thing being examined in order to unlock insights that are not possible when a single case is offered as the exemplar of a wider phenomenon. It is an effective approach when studying childhood globally, as it allows a broad sampling. The traveling exhibit at the Lyman Allyn includes twenty-six children and their sleeping spaces from Brazil, Cambodia, China, Colombia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lesotho, Nepal, Senegal, Thailand, the United States, and the West Bank (Figure 2). It is also an approach that lends itself to flexibility. Mollison’s 2010 book included fifty-six children; his 2011 TEDx Talk referenced fifty-eight.
Figure 2. Where Children Sleep, as installed at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, Connecticut. Bikram, 9, Makwanpur, Nepal. Photo by author.
A characteristic of Mollison’s typological approach is to represent each of his examples in a similar way and in other projects (notably James and Other Apes) he has used a single photograph to capture each individual. In this project, however, each subject is represented by two images—a studio portrait of the child and a separate photograph of where the child sleeps—accompanied by narrative label that provides (in most cases) the child’s first name and age, as well as information about where and with whom the child lives, what they eat, whether they go to school, what activities they like best, and (in some cases) what they aspire to do as adults. (In one case, Mollison omitted the child’s name, identifying him only as a Romanian boy living on the outskirts of Rome; that label suggests that in the other cases, he secured permission to use the first name the child preferred.) Written for an audience of 7- to 11-year-olds, the labels represent a dramatic departure from the older tradition of reform photography in which unnamed children were deployed as examples of human “types”: urchins, newsboys, ragamuffins, and Street Arabs. Equally important is the decision to separate the children from their living conditions. In photographs by Riis and his contemporaries, human subjects were inseparable from their environments, the qualities and fates of both conjoined. Here, individual children are defined by not by their surroundings, but by their distinct interests and aspirations.
Another departure from reform photography is to include children from all sorts of family situations with access to a wide range of financial resources. Many of the children he includes live in abject poverty, some orphaned by AIDS, others forced to flee ethnic violence, still others internally displaced by drug violence. Yet, rather than focus his lens solely on the neediest children (an approach that lends itself to pathologizing the poor), he also includes children whose families have ample means. Jasmine (who prefers Jazzy), for instance, is a four-year-old from New Jersey, who has already participated in over one hundred beauty pageants, each of which cost her parents about $1000. A 9-year-old who lives on Fifth Avenue in New York, Jaime goes to private school and “likes to study his finances on the Citibank website,” according to the label text. Four-year-old Kaya, from Tokyo, has thirty dresses and coats, thirty pairs of shoes and numerous wigs. Although this particular version of the project did not include the offspring of any rich families from the Global South, it did feature North American children living in poverty. In Kentucky, Alyssa’s mother works at McDonald’s and her father at Walmart, but they are poor, living in a small shabby house where the ceiling of the girl’s bedroom is collapsing. At the same time, the text labels do no assume an audience from any particular geographical locale; the paragraph about Alyssa explains that Kentucky is in “a beautiful, mountainous region known as Appalachia, but one of the poorest parts of America” (Figure 3). With its choice of images, Where Children Sleep refuses to let viewers (whatever their own location) to enjoy the comfortable fiction that poverty only happens elsewhere.
Figure 3. Where Children Sleep, as installed at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, Connecticut. From left to right: Kaya, 4, Tokyo, Japan; Romanian Boy, 4, Rome, Italy; Jasmine, 4, Kentucky, USA. Photo by author.
The studio of portraits of the children may be the most stunning aspect of the project, as Mollison has shunned the most commonplace visual tropes of childhood. Photographed against a pale grey background, there has been no attempt to introduce pastel colors; the installation at the Lyman Allyn heightens the impact of this color choice by hanging the images on walls of a highly saturated dark blue. Nor do they hold playthings, a favorite signifier of childhood in the Western pictorial tradition. True, Justin, from New Jersey, wears his football uniform, and Joey, from Kentucky, holds a hunting rifle. Yet, the other objects the sitters hold directly are associated with work: Lamine, a 12-year-old from Bounkiling, Senegal, holds a pick-axe which he uses each morning on the farm at his school; Indira, a 7-year-old from Kathmandu, Nepal, holds the hammer she has used at a granite quarry since she started work there at age three; Bilal, a 6-year-old Bedouin Arab living near Wadi Abu Hindi in the West Bank, holds one of the family’s fifteen goats; and Roathy, an 8-year-old from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, carries a bag of cans and plastic bottles scavenged from the rubbish dump where his family lives (Figures 4a and 4b).
Figure 4a. James Mollison, Lamine, 12, Bounkiling, Senegal. Courtesy of Curatorial Exhibitions, Pasadena, California.
Figure 4b. James Mollison, Lamine, 12, Bounkiling, Senegal. Courtesy of Curatorial Exhibitions, Pasadena, California.
Equally striking is the size of the images, which are big, measuring approximately 20” x 25.” Given that many of the photographs show only the sitter’s head and shoulders and that others show the subject from the knees up or from the waist up, the images are at least life size. In almost every case, the child does not smile, but instead looks directly at the viewer with a somber expression. (The one exception is the beauty-pageant regular, Jazzy.) In each case, the images are hung so that the child—however large or small they may be in reality—meets the gaze of the adult onlooker. In short, Mollison allows his young sitters a kind of dignity that is usually reserved only for their elders.
Mollison’s treats the places these children sleep with similar respect. The New Jersey bedroom that 9-year-old Delanie can call her own; the corn store in Makwanpur, Nepal, where 9-year-old Bikram sleeps with the grandparents, aunt, uncle and two cousins; the mud hut in Maqokho, Lesotho, that 6-year-old Lehlohonolo shares with his three brothers—these and other spaces are photographed in the same way, with the camera aimed into one corner which forms a vertical line parallel to and about a third of the way in from the right edge of the image. Not every situation lends itself to this treatment, of course, especially when children sleep in the open. Mollison, however, handles these instances with seriousness and care. The discarded couch in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, on which 9-year-old Alex sleeps is a commanding presence, filling the middle ground of the image, its edges parallel to the picture plane, its midpoint aligned with the midpoint of the photograph.
“With its choice of images, Where Children Sleep refuses to let viewers (whatever their own location) to enjoy the comfortable fiction that poverty only happens elsewhere.”
Figure 5. Where Children Sleep, as installed at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, Connecticut. Lay Lay, 4, Mae Sot, Thailand. Photo by author.
In other instances, Mollison seems to break his own compositional rules for other reasons. His image of the place where 4-year-old Lay Lay sleeps in an orphanage in Mae Sot, Thailand, is dominated by a grid of twenty plastic bins, each one holding all the belongings of a single child (Figure 5). In part, this presentation accentuates the fact that Lay Lay and the other orphans sleep together in rooms that are used for other purposes during the day. At the same time, however, this treatment of the picture plane also invites comparisons with 4-year-old Kaya’s bedroom in Tokyo, where a visually similar grid is created by a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowing with toys and clothes. In contrast, the nearly orthogonal presentation of room where 10-year-old Douha sleeps with her five sisters in a refugee camp in Hebron, in the West Bank, also serves to highlight the martyr poster of their brother, Mohammad, a suicide bomber who had killed himself and twenty-three civilians in 1996. As the image of Douha’s shared bedroom makes clear, the world of childhood is always embedded in larger world events. Indeed, one of the unspoken advantages of Mollison’s typological approach is that is offers a multidirectional matrix that allows viewers to undertake comparisons of many different kinds, only some of which are suggested by the photographer.
It is strange to think that Mollison’s young sitters, if they are still alive, are now adults. Yet, they have undoubtedly been replaced by other youngsters grappling with the food insecurity, natural disasters, and armed conflict. Indeed, Save the Children estimates that today nearly 200 million children are living in lethal war zones—more than at any time in the past twenty years. In the face of such large-scale humanitarian crises, it is easy to revert to seeing children as statistics. Hence, the on-going power of Where Children Sleeps and its reminder that Lamine liked to play football with his friends and that Indira wanted to become a Nepalese dancer.
Notes
[1] Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith, “Good to Think With—History, Space, and Modern Childhood,” in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, eds. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 3-4.
