A parent enters a home and reflexively scans for peril. Coffee tables practically beckon tender skulls to crash upon them. Power outlets and overstuffed surge protectors buzz with danger. Knife blocks glint with threat. A shallow swimming pool is a site for dives gone wrong. A deep swimming pool is a magnet for drownings. Plastic bags asphyxiate. Hoses choke. Sunshine burns the skin and exposes it to cancer. Stairs can be tumbled down. Stair railings can be just wide enough to trap a head. Worse: no railings at all. Pull cords. Gas stoves. Slippery, freshly waxed floors. Thick-pile carpet. High cabinets that produce avalanches of crockery. Low cabinets that ooze with industrial chemicals. Anything glass. Anything with edges. Anything at all, really.
Julie Blackmon’s photos in Midwest Materials at once capture these anxieties and satirize them. For two decades she’s been producing staged photographs of children in her native Missouri. As one of nine siblings and a mother herself, she has a trained eye for children’s rambunctiousness, the way they eagerly claim and rework adult spaces, and the fear they can strike in mom and dad’s hearts. Grownups are almost entirely absent in her photos, and the ones who do appear aren’t parents. All of which gives her best photos a frisson of uncertainty — there’s danger, but the scope of it isn’t clear. “Costco” is a side view of van outside the superstore, all doors open, bounty on display: boxes of Cheez-Its and vodka, a sack of sugar, the kind of enormous teddy bear you win at the state fair. A child holds a family-size bag of Doritos that’s nearly as big as he is. Other kids sit and scamper nearby. It’s a sober photo, a Burtynsky-esque snapshot of suspiciously well-scrubbed consumerism. But it’s also funny, the punchline to what must be a weird story. There’s a kid slumped in the driver’s seat. Maybe he handled the driving to Costco?
But as much as her images suggest uncertainty, strangeness, and peril, there’s also something celebratory about them. Parents love free-range children; we love watching them acquire the tools to become themselves. So Blackmon’s environments are usually bright and colorful, the children’s moods generally playful, though without the fake smiles of school photos. Understandably, Blackmon is often compared to Sally Mann and Diane Arbus, who both specialized in revealing the fragility and weirdness of children. But looking at Midwest Materials, I was more strongly reminded of Edward Gorey, particularly his droll, macabre book The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an abecedary of juvenile demise. (“K is for Kate who was struck by an axe,” etc.) The photos also evoke Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, in which children — whose parents are almost always absent — philosophize, diagnose, and dramatize, separate from the adult world but also playacting at its roles and routines. What Umberto Eco wrote of the strip also applies to many of the images in Midwest Materials: “The poetry of these children arises from the fact that we find in them all the problems, all the sufferings of the adults, who remain offstage. These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters: they are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of industrial civilization.”
What to do with these kids, with the world that Blackmon has put them in? Do they need saving, or freedom? Both? In what measure? Many of the images in Midwest Materials train the eye to scan like a parent, like a hidden-image puzzle where what you’re looking for is potential tragedy. Multiple images feature knives casually set aside after cutting cakes and melons. Other images feature a child face-down in a river or pool. River is a bird’s-eye shot of a group of children playing around a floating dock. It’s a bright day and a baby lies shirtless, exposed to the bright sun. There is a literal banana peel at the dock’s edge. In “Fixer Upper,” children either navigate or have strollers parked next to a dilapidated two-story shack. A child runs from a dive-bombing goose in “Outing” — is the bird coming for the girl, the Happy Meal she’s left on a picnic blanket, or both?
The children in Blackmon’s images are so uniformly innocent and relaxed that an answer never clearly announces itself. They neither project or absorb the fear that their environment creates around them. (If anything, they actively defy it — smoking cigarettes, gorging on junk food, romping in enclosed porches and living rooms.) Yet Blackmon doesn’t want us to see them exclusively as interior beings, isolated from the world. In “New Neighbors,” two explicitly Arbus-y girls wearing the same red dress look across an easement at a toddler on a scooter. Apart from this standoff is a darker story: Left by the curb, presumably by the previous residents, are a stack of books implying family trouble: Failure to Launch, The Explosive Child, How to Raise an Adult, the Al-Anon handbook Hope for Today.
Blackmon carefully cultivates and stage-manages this sense of mystery; her balance of fear and liberation is always precarious. But that carefulness isn’t always an asset: If the kids are constantly at the edge of peril, the images are sometimes on the edge of cutesiness or hokum. “Bubble,” featuring a toddler on a sidewalk enveloped in one, feels comparatively silly and obvious. In “Records,” a group of kids frolic with 70s LPs — Elvis, Dolly Parton — in a bare living room; the word “shit” is written in marker on the wooden floor, in a child’s script, but these kids are so plainly possessed of their own sense of defiance that such a cliched act of vandalism doesn’t register. The same is true of “Trapped,” which features no humans at all, just a cat on a bench in a dusty garage filled with skateboards, old magazines, a now-meaningless Clinton-Kaine yard sign. Somebody has spelled out “fuck” on each of the garage’s four grimy, circular windows. The scene is so flat, its provocation so phony, that it hardly matters who smeared the swear word, be it a neighbor, a kid, or, hell, the cat.
But the image gets at something important in Blackmon’s work: Every photo in Midwest Materials could profitably be titled “Trapped.” The suburbs, Blackmon knows, offer at best a limited notion of freedom; these kids’ lives are still circumscribed by the homes they live in, the culture they consume, the superstores that supply them, and the limited range of “fun” options available to them. Many of Blackmon’s images show these kids trying to break through those walls, which provoke the viewer’s own sense of protectiveness. Do they need more protection? Saving? Should we call child services? Or should we ease up, set them loose with nothing but diapers and their free will? The response will depend on the viewer. Cruelly, charmingly, Blackmon has abandoned us. We, too, are free to decide.
[Published by Radius Books on September 6, 2022, 108 pages; $55 hardcover]
