1. GHOSTS IN A GHOST’S
PLACE
b.j. muirhead
A lot of my recent thinking about the nude has revolved around
naked children in art photography, at least partially because these
are the most contentious nudes produced in the contemporary world.
All of the negative thoughts people entertain about the nude are
intensified when the subject is a (naked) child.
What is at issue is not merely hysteria about paedophilia, but the
Judaeo-Christian ethical tradition in which nakedness cannot be dis-
connected from sex and sexuality. In this tradition nakedness operates
as a euphemism for sex. A naked body, therefore, automatically is
sexual, and nakedness often is understood in terms of forbidden forms
of sexuality. (Cover 2003, pp. 55–56)
In a society which largely denies childhood sexuality (often with
the sophistic claim that children are not sexual because they don’t
know that what they are doing and enjoying is sexual) in preference
for the claim that children are “innocent”, and in a society which is
returning to the tradition of seeing the naked body as purely sexual,
(Cover 2003, p. 65) a naked (child’s) body can be understood only as
an invitation to sex with that body. Just as important as this is the
modern idea that meaning is produced in the act of looking (reading), in the
relationship between the photograph (text)and the viewer (reader). (Cover
2003, p. 65) This leads us to the awkward situation described by James
Kincaid (2000):
Since it is what is outside the frame (the intention of
the photographer, the reaction of the viewer) that counts
legally, we are actually encouraged to fantasize an action
in order to determine whether or not this is child pornog-
raphy.
Every photo must pass this test: Can we create a sexual
fantasy that includes it? Such directives seem an efficient
means for manufacturing a whole nation of paedophiles.
If Kincaid is correct in suggesting that this is how we determine what
unacceptable images of a naked child are, and I believe he is, then
it seems to me to be impossible to look at any photograph of any
child with a clear conscience—it always is possible to create a sexual
story/interpretation of any image, especially in a society which is
obsessed by the bodies of children, and in which nearly everyone is
imagined to be driven wild by the sight of a child. (see Kincaid 1998,
2000)
Bearing this in mind, I want too look at the following photograph
by Alfonso de Castro.
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2. Figure 1: Alfonso de Castro, Ghosts in a ghost’s place, Guiyang
It always has struck me as odd that people prefer an “interpretation”
over a period of consistent looking, but for many, an interpretation is
all that there is. If we take the approach Kincaid mentioned, we are in
the territory of the obscene immediately. The girls, quite obviously,
are “tarted up” with piercings and lipstick, and while the girl on the
left has painted fingernails, the one on the right has a small dog collar
style necklace. Deviant sexuality is rampant throughout the image,
if that is what we want to see. For many the foregoing, not entirely
accurate, description would be enough, but if you wanted to do so
you also could mention the curve of the girl’s abdomen on the left,
how it draws one to the (hidden) pubic area, how their lower bodies
are pressed (suggestively?) together. . .
I could go on and create an even more sexual interpretation, but
such an interpretation would not tell us a great deal about this photo,
which I chose to talk about for two reasons: (a) I think it is a brilliant
photograph. The composition, the expressions, the mood of the image
all work together exceptionally well. An analysis of the structural lines
and their rhythms show how we are drawn to the faces and then back
down to the bodies, how we see the specific within the dark, and how
this draws us into a contemplation of the humanity on show. (b) It is
a photograph which I find difficult to explain and which I cannot see
sexually. The body decoration, to me, simply highlights the essential
humanity of the people shown and without it, there would be less
human effect.
The girl on the right appears to be comforting or protecting the girl
on the left, who seems very hard, drawn back into herself; drawing
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3. away from an intrusion and preparing her fist for attack? or defence?
But these words do not accurately reflect what I am seeing. The more
I look at the photo, the more difficult I find the discovery of appro-
priate words—a description also is an interpretation, and I find that
my descriptions are not matching the tacit knowledge engendered
by looking. Indeed, every step toward explicit interpretation or de-
scription takes me further away from what I know tacitly about this
image.
This doesn’t entail that no one can put these issues into words, it
merely means that I cannot do so. Indeed, it was the inability of words
to say clearly what an image can say with clarity that led me to take
up visual art long ago.
An easier approach would be to use the title as a basis for an
interpretation, (see Franklin et al. 1993) to try and answer questions
such as Who or what are the ghosts? Have the girls seen a ghost or are they
the ghosts? Where is a ghost’s place anyway? If the girls are ghosts, then
what are they telling us?
The title suggests two things to me: childhood and death—the death
of life, the death of childhood. The girl on the left has “demon eyes”,
perhaps she is dead and the other girl?
An interpretation based on issues such as this makes much more
sense than a specifically sexual interpretation, and draws out feelings
one has about one’s own childhood, about childhoods one has encoun-
tered. It invites thoughts about childhood play and perhaps of the
discomfort of being discovered playing in a way that you know your
parents will frown on. This type of interpretation would have a lot of
sense in an immediate fashion, especially for those, like me, who re-
member playing naked with other children, and the sheer joy of being
naked and bumping into the body of one’s playmate—purposely, of
course.
Another photograph of Ghosts in a ghost’s place (in the dark, outside?
in our memory, half forgotten?) draws closer to the idea of childhood
play, but perhaps this again is possible only for those who remember
playing with a torch in the dark, and how quickly we would get naked
because, as James T. Kirk said, It was fun. . .
What was so much fun about being naked as a child was the sense of
freedom, the pleasure of being alive, “the embodied, creative impulse
of humanity—mirroring the intimacies of the cosmos,” (Sohmer 2015)
a sense of transcendence merely from naked play with each other.
Looking at an artwork can create within the viewer this sense of
transcendence, of timelessness, a sense of connection and perfection
usually associated with mystical states which often are thought of in
erotic terms. At the same time it is true that there are
sexual undercurrents of pleasure and desire that do, in fact,
exist in non-sexual frameworks of naked behaviour—the
pleasure of gazing and the desire to know, the pleasure of
showing and the desire to be seen. (Cover 2003, p. 67)
These very pleasures exist in art featuring the naked body, whether
the body is a child or an adult, indeed, the pleasure of gazing and the
desire to know are common to all art, but they are at a remove which
enables the viewer to encounter what Rudolf Otto (1958) called the
numinous.
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4. Figure 2: Alfonso de Castro, Ghosts in a ghost’s place
The sense of the numinous cannot be transmitted from one person
to another, but must be “awakened” from the spirit, (Otto 1958, p. 60)
and art is one of the means which can be used to achieve this end,
whether by religious art decorating a church (the design of which is
in itself intended to evoke the numinous) or in secular art. (see Otto
1958, pp. 65–71 for his views on this.) Art, this is to say, leads us to
experience the mysterium, tremendum et fascinans which Otto believed
characterised the numinous.
It is true to say that contemporary society has difficulty in taking
this type of view to the naked (child’s) body, but it seems to me, if
we step outside of ourselves for a moment, that the images in art do
indeed present us with something which is “wholly other” and so
mysterious, that they also evoke the sense of awe that is the tremendum,
and that they do (or can) bring a sense of wonder and grace which
carry us far from mere physical sex, but which contain the simple
pleasures of being human.
This idea has many versions. Sohmer, (2015) for example, talks of
this type of experience as Holistic Sex, as something which can occur
during physical sex of any variety. Unfortunately, when looking at a
body, the erotic nature of the experience appears much more sexual
than it is. Eros is the life force behind the creation of art, behind all
expansion of life and into life. Only a very small aspect of this is
sexual.
Although Otto may not have appreciated my characterisation, it
seems to me that the experience of the numinous is an erotic experi-
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5. ence, an experience of the non-rational factors of life which infiltrate
every aspect of our lives even when we ignore them. To be attracted
to someone is to experience the erotic, to gaze into their eyes is to
encounter the numinous/erotic within and of that person, it is to share
this with them in a manner which transcends there mere sexuality, no
matter how sexual the two of you are with each other.
When I look at a photograph of a naked person, this is the realm
I enter—a realm of transcendence where a timeless appreciation of
the humanity of the person photographed becomes what I am experi-
encing. It is a realm where our experience connects with the deepest
aspects of our humanity. It is this which prevents me from giving a
sexual interpretation of either of de Castro’s images. I experience the
visual pleasure of looking, but this pleasure takes me into the realm
of the numinous where I experience what could be called the holy
within the human. (Of course, it depends on the quality of the pho-
tograph, how well it has been conceived and taken. This also occurs
in respect of paintings and drawings, but photography is somewhat
more interesting due to it’s perceived nature as a copy of reality.)
Art, it has been said often, requires contemplation, a rather pale
word for a process of entering into the experience of the mysterium,
tremendum et fascinans that takes us into the otherness, the humanity,
the eros that is humanity held at a visual distance.
This, at lest, is how I experience de Castro’s photographs, and many
of those by Henson and Jock Sturges. If it is sexual, then it is so at a
great distance from physical sexuality, from the visceral experiences
which constitute sex. It is “only when the erotic breaks free from
its sexual classifications, regimentations and codes” that it can be
“acknowledged that the erotic is both pervasive and innocent.” (Cover
2003, p. 69) But we cannot do this if we continue to tell stories about
what we see in place of looking at what we see.
Years ago, when I had a library of books on “how to write,” one of
them contained an exercise which consisted of writing a short story
based on a photograph. In order to complete the exercise the “trainee
author” needed to invent a story about what happened outside of the
frame, both before and after the moment photographed.
What is inside the frame, what we are looking at, are two naked
girls whose age is somewhat indeterminate. It is easy to imagine a
story, before, after, and during, which would make the image totally
paedosexual, but in order to do so, I necessarily must falsify the
photograph, I must claim not only that there is more in it than there
is, I also must claim to know the photographer’s purpose and the
viewer’s paedosexual reaction.
The creation of such a story may well be a marvellous exercise in
fiction, but it completely avoids the far more simple human reactions
of pleasure in the eros of humanity, of a glimpse into the numinous
human body.
With this in mind, it behoves us to remember Kincaid’s comment
that
Admitting to an erotic attraction is not the same thing
as admitting to rape or assault: We do not commonly
attack what we love and we do not feel the need to act on
every impulse. Finding something erotic does not drive us
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6. irresistibly to mount it. We could use more complexity in
our thinking on this subject, more tolerance for difficulty.
And a lot more honesty.
references
Cover, R. (2003), ‘The naked subject: Nudity, context and
sexualization in contemporary culture’, Body and Society
9(3), 53–72.
URL: http://bod.sagepub.com/content/9/3/53
Franklin, M. B., Becklin, R. C. & Doyle, C. L. (1993), ‘The
influence of titles on how paintings are seen’, Leonardo
26(2), 103–108.
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1575894 .
Kincaid, J. R. (1998), Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child
Molesting, Duke University Press, Durham and London.
Kincaid, J. R. (2000), ‘Is this child pornography?’. Viewed
23 Frbruary 2015.
URL: http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/2000/01/31
/kincaid/index.html
Otto, R. (1958), The Idea of The Holy, second edn, Oxford
University Press. Tanslated by John W. Harvey.
Sohmer, S. L. (2015), ‘Timeless sex’, Unpublished article .
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