Clothing the Child's Body

Abstract

Sally Mann’s 1989 photograph The New Mothers contradicts ideals of childhood innocence. The clothing and accessories worn by the image’s two girls engage conventions of childhood now more than two centuries old, only to pit them against body language. The New Mothers is as disturbing as our beliefs in the visual signs of childhood are deeply ingrained, and as our vision of childhood is now threatened by change. Superficially, The New Mothers belongs to one of the most widespread and cherished types of current photography: the snapshot of cute children playing childishly, all the more childishly because they are masquerading unconvincingly as adults. In the case of The New Mothers (Figure 1), two girls wearing special clothing take their dolls for a stroll. Anne Higonnet and Cassi Albinson

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.