While the narratives of childhood have a familiar sentimentality, there are still other possibilities available to us, showing instead the more complex state of what is lived, if being perhaps no more “true” in any sense. Take for example the uncanny, often disturbing scenes to be found in the work of Margret M. de Lange, addressed more directly to a psychological space than the worldly, and where even moments of wonder have their dark edges, a kind of prescience. If she captures those deep reveries of childhood (and I think she does) her pictures themselves are more profoundly informed by the tension of comparing these seemingly charmed moments of being to the very adult realisation of lost innocence. But to be born takes a long time and has an erratic trajectory; de Lange clearly understands her daughters are near feral beings, or are still not quite of the human mould. Their vulnerability is of an altogether different sort and if we have forgotten this other time, then the pictures cannot entirely (or even in part) return that to us, though we can get a distant sense of it – calling up some phantom memory, a sympathetic glance at abandon, which we no longer have access to and that might, on closer inspection, be something we find only by wanting to see it.
The rest of this project can be found here.
