{"id":327,"date":"2021-09-30T18:18:55","date_gmt":"2021-09-30T18:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/?page_id=327"},"modified":"2026-04-26T01:37:39","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T01:37:39","slug":"portraits-of-innocence","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/portraits-of-innocence\/","title":{"rendered":"Portraits of innocence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The other week, I dusted off my Pentax and took my cousin\u2019s senior portrait.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The experience brought back memories of my own yearbook photo\u2014a glossy, airbrushed lie. At 17 my forehead was acned, my complexion spotty. You wouldn\u2019t know it from looking at my senior picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tradition of eternalizing our high school selves in yearbooks is weird and softly deceitful. But it\u2019s not too different from portraiture\u2019s origins, when wealthy patrons would pay painters for flattering likenesses, presumably ones that\u2019d last forever. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, the tradition of portraiture is old\u2014the tradition of children-as-individuals, less so, and the existence of the teenager, even newer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Newport Art Museum unfolds these themes with two new shows: \u201cWinslow Homer: America at Play\u201d and \u201cForever Young\u201d are now on view through December 1 and 31, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Curator Francine Weiss rarely shies away from her expertise of photography in collection-focused exhibits like these. As expected there\u2019s a generous helping of gorgeous photographs on display. Weiss said she reached out to artists, galleries and institutions to widen the exhibit\u2019s scope and variety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might be glad she did, as one can now see photos from many thought-provoking photogs. There\u2019s Sally Mann, whose \u201cKelly and the Deer\u201d juxtaposes dangling carcasses with a 12 year-old girl\u2019s androgynous swagger. Suzanne R\u00e9vy\u2019s photos of her teenaged sons avoid the traps and lures of the sentimental. \u201cReflection\u201d is a perfectly apt title for a photo that will serve as such to anyone who\u2019s ever been a moody boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, much of the work in \u201cForever Young\u201d (as Weiss\u2019 wall text points out) deals with \u201cthe belief that children have individual identities and psychological dimensions.\u201d A more-than-adequate survey emerges, detailing kids and teens\u2019 appearances in art of the last three centuries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So an obvious omission is work made by teenagers themselves. Yes, such inclusions could’ve risked juvenilia, and subjective distance is useful in a show about something universal. But teenagers\u2019 self-representation is nevertheless an important, missing piece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swapping out the theme of individuality is companion exhibit \u201cAmerica at Play.\u201d It consists of engravings of Winslow Homer\u2019s illustrations, created for popular magazines and weeklies in the 1860s and 1870s. Homer\u2019s images are mostly ones of collective joy. Compared to the contemporary works nearby, his sceneries are less about interior states than shared activities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Homer doesn’t evaporate children\u2019s humanity. A memorable diptych, \u201cFlirting at the Seashore and on the Meadow,\u201d compares fledging feelings to adult ones. Puppy love fills the day, while adult passion rendezvouses at night, hiding behind the sound of waves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Weiss explains in the wall text, Homer’s work \u201cbecame part of the fabric of nineteenth-century visual culture.\u201d Engineered for nostalgia, Homer’s prints offer, perhaps, an uncomplicated vision. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in \u201cForever Young,\u201d Cynthia Consentino takes on a much more troubling social reality. In \u201cErin\u201d and \u201cGirls with Guns,\u201d a girl statue (smirking, arms akimbo) is defended by a battalion of armed, doll-sized, silver girls. Its energy is ambiguous enough that it could be a myth or a meme, with its possible interpretations ranging from laughter to terror. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversely, myth becomes reality in Diane Arbus’ photographs. Here, in a tiny square of silver gelatin, is one of Arbus\u2019 most famous images: \u201cIdentical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the Mount Holyoke Art Museum, who loaned the print for this exhibit, the reverse contains a note inked by Arbus herself, written to a friend whom she missed at an exhibit opening. That this particular print was used as a postcard only enhances its intimacy, its totemic powers. I was reminded instantly that this is my favorite photograph. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The father of the twins pictured wasn\u2019t as impressed. Bob Wade told the Washington Post in 2005: \u201cWe thought it was the worst likeness of the twins we’d ever seen\u2026.I mean it resembles them. But we’ve always been baffled that she made them look ghostly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A senior picture is an idealized representation; it\u2019s both alike and alien. \u201cIdentical Twins\u201d is similar, presenting an ideal binary: one twin smiling, the other stoic. Together they form a contradiction, one that made me feel young and unsure all over again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That we ourselves contain such opposites is a fact of existence we learn poignantly, sometimes painfully, in adolescence and beyond. As the philosopher Hegel wrote: \u201cEvery actual thing contains a coexistence of opposed elements.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, to put it another way: we are all identical twins from Roselle, New Jersey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

-30-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reprinted from Newport Daily News (October 2019)
Also syndicated in Providence Journal<\/a> (Nov 14, 2019 print edition)
Editor: Will Richmond<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The other week, I dusted off my Pentax and took my cousin\u2019s senior portrait. The experience brought back memories of my own yearbook photo\u2014a glossy, airbrushed lie. At 17 my forehead was acned, my complexion spotty. You wouldn\u2019t know it from looking at my senior picture. The tradition of eternalizing our high school selves in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-327","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1310,"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/327\/revisions\/1310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}