A Vast Image-Life

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For all of the joy and adventure one can associate with childhood and child-rearing, there is a flair of foreboding, even menace, that I associate with children—beings close to the beginning of ‘life.’ My caution is no doubt linked to the vein of narratives that trade in demonic possession and passage (The Omen, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby) but this apprehension could also be stoked by their proximity to non-life. Their newness to the world of the living. It could also be the fact that many instances of childbirth can spell catastrophe for the person giving birth and to the person being birthed. Proximities like this can be sticky. The places where life and non-life leak into each other reveal how enmeshed they are, contrary to the sovereignty I have been taught to expect.

A pregnancy is a series of events, but it is hard to downplay labour and birth as points of heightened significance. My sister almost died while giving birth to her first child. She had a form of preeclampsia, which put her and her child in grave danger. Six weeks before her due date, the family was slightly more scattered than usual; her husband away for work, my father and step-mother away for vacation and myself away for school. As is usually the case, she was the calmest of all of us and I cried in a cafe until she phoned me from the hospital and told me the plan.

Birth is a fulcrum at which we might place the beginning of life, and of this particular moment I wondered if the state before life (if anything at all) is the same space as the state after life? I suppose this would have to do with how one conceptualizes and visualizes life; as a corridor between rooms? A pool into which we dip very briefly? A fire which burns and goes out—possibly without regard for or a conception of its fuel or the ashes it leaves behind.

An example that could shed more truth on the market for images of children might be found on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind in which an infant floats in a body of water, seemingly drawn to a dollar bill impaled on a fishhook. 30 years after the explosion of the album and the unfathomable proliferation of the image, the child depicted unsuccessfully sued the record company and the band which continues to use this image of a naked child to generate millions of dollars. Many articles I have read about the case implicitly questioned the motivations of the man (now in his early thirties) citing past, more positive statements on the photograph and the recreations he has participated in.² This stance seems to be echoed by some entertainment lawyers who have commented on the case.³ The structure of these articles implies that these authors might be unaware of the ways that one’s perception of their image (and more to the point, the way it has been monetized) might change over the course of one’s life. Even if, as these articles suggest, this is some cynical cash grab on the part of the plaintiff, I can imagine almost everything to do with Nirvana after (possibly before?) Kurt Cobain’s death was a similarly cynical transaction and it is hard for me to blame the kid for trying to get a cut.

Just after my undergraduate degree, I lived briefly with a Rhodes scholar who was about to embark on her Master’s Degree at Oxford. One afternoon I laughed at a tweet from a local troll account that read something like “is it possible for white student aid-workers to travel to Africa without photographing themselves with an anonymous group of Black children??” I read the tweet out to the kitchen and the scholar furrowed her brow, replying with “is it possible that this guy is a fucking asshole?” I was a little surprised by the response but moved on with my day. Later, I asked another housemate about the exchange and she said, “well she did do an aid trip last year” and I wondered if there was, somewhere deep in the feed, an image of this young woman posing with a group of local children—taken as a souvenir of her vacation and a record of her goodness. 

For many years, on Tinder and similar dating sites, it was common to see profile pictures of men holding babies. In my most cynical moments, I imagined the article informing men that this would attract young women on some primal level. Perhaps it was a trend that spiralled out from some centralized idiocy or maybe it was a more generalized expression of heteronormative misogyny, or maybe even a genuine expression of love for children? In any case, I often recoil when children are made into images, even more so when they see a camera (most often a phone) and make themselves into images, posing reflexively.⁷

The boundaries my sister sets on behalf of her children, as she has described them to me, are about consent. She is wary of their digital life beginning before they are able to make informed choices about where their image circulates. Far from being a judgment about the use of images, her rule makes me think about my wholesale dumping of images into corporate databases and if I ever gave myself time to think about its implications. As someone whose adolescence was twinned with that of the internet and social media, I often feel like the proverbial frog in a pot of water as the temperature was raised very slowly until it was boiled alive. For now, her children dwell in a state of pre-exposure to the ocean of images. As an act of parental stewardship, she and her husband have made a cove for them, a second space of gestation before they elect themselves and their images into a strange and vast image-life.