The Visual Cultures of Childhood

Film and Television from The Magic Lantern To Teen Vloggers

Karen Wells

Some of the most iconic images of the twentieth century are of children: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, depicting farm worker Frances Owens Thompson with three of her children; six-year-old Ruby Bridges, flanked by U.S. marshals, walking down the steps of an all-white elementary school she desegregated; Huỳnh Công Út’s photograph of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a South Vietnamese napalm bombing. These iconic images with their juxtaposition of the innocent (in the sense of not culpable) figure of the child and the guilty perpetrators of violence (both structural and interpersonal) are ‘arresting’. The power of the image of the child to arrest the spectator, to demand a response from her has given the representation of children a central place in the history of visual culture for social reform. This book analyses a range of forms and genres from social reform documentary through feature films and onto small and mobile media to address two core questions: What difference does it make to the message who the producer is? and How has the place of children and youth changed in visual public culture?

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 200 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9

978-1-78661-103-1 • Hardback • March 2020 • $158.00 • (£123.00)

978-1-5381-4823-5 • Paperback • October 2022 • $38.00 • (£30.00)

978-1-78661-104-8 • eBook • March 2020 • $36.00 • (£30.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Media Studies, Education / Early Childhood (incl. Preschool & Kindergarten)

The Visual Cultures of Childhood

Film and Television from The Magic Lantern To Teen Vloggers

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Some of the most iconic images of the twentieth century are of children: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, depicting farm worker Frances Owens Thompson with three of her children; six-year-old Ruby Bridges, flanked by U.S. marshals, walking down the steps of an all-white elementary school she desegregated; Huỳnh Công Út’s photograph of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a South Vietnamese napalm bombing. These iconic images with their juxtaposition of the innocent (in the sense of not culpable) figure of the child and the guilty perpetrators of violence (both structural and interpersonal) are ‘arresting’. The power of the image of the child to arrest the spectator, to demand a response from her has given the representation of children a central place in the history of visual culture for social reform. This book analyses a range of forms and genres from social reform documentary through feature films and onto small and mobile media to address two core questions: What difference does it make to the message who the producer is? and How has the place of children and youth changed in visual public culture?

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 200 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9

978-1-78661-103-1 • Hardback • March 2020 • $158.00 • (£123.00)

978-1-5381-4823-5 • Paperback • October 2022 • $38.00 • (£30.00)

978-1-78661-104-8 • eBook • March 2020 • $36.00 • (£30.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Media Studies, Education / Early Childhood (incl. Preschool & Kindergarten)

Author

Karen Wells is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography, Birkbeck, University of London.

Table of Contents

1. Visual Political Culture, Childhood and Youth: From Object to Subject to Activist
2. The Emergence of a Sentimental Visual Culture
3. ‘And Then the Kids Took it Over’: Documentary Film, Racism and the Civil Rights Movement
4. The Melodrama of Being a Child: NGO Representations of Poverty
5. ‘You Need to be Glad That You Graduated from High School, and That You're Alive at Eighteen’: Coming-Of-Age in Black Film
6. We’ve Got a Bright Place in the Sun: LGBTQ Coming Out and Teen Melodrama
7. ‘I’d Be Lost Without the Weight of You Two on My Back’: Working Class Teens and the Western
8. ‘On Being the Representation’
9. ‘We the Wounded’: Violence and Citizenship
10. Theorising Childhood, Visual Culture, and Technology

Reviews

In The Visual Cultures of Childhood, Wells (human geography, Univ. of London, UK) uses photography, film, and digital media to examine the image of children in visual culture. Wells writes that the “power of the image of the child to arrest the spectator ... has given the representation of children a central place in the history of visual culture for social reform” (p. 1). Emphasizing US primary sources, Wells examines children and youth in social-reform documentary film, international nongovernmental organization campaign and sponsorship films, coming-of-age films by African American directors, LGBTQ films that are LGB written and/or directed, and coming-of-age working-class youth films in the Western genre. . . Wells also examines YouTube content produced by micro-celebrity LGBT+ activists and the visual culture of the Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, and South Dakota Pipeline movements. The book includes a table of budgets and box office receipts for select African American coming-of-age films. . . Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

— Choice Reviews

The representation of the African American child and children of the colonial reaches of the British Empire is a crucial aspect of visual knowledge. In the first quarter of the 21st century the subjugation of Black youth and children through fatal racist violence continues, as do cultures of discrimination, imprisonment and abuse. It is necessary that histories of representation are written, read and widely taught. This book offers such a history, and will be of great benefit to high school and university students.
— Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Professor of Film, Lincoln University and Honorary Professor, UNSW