Children should be seen and not heard.” An all too familiar repressive declaration, this view was spawned in the Victorian Age, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in which children of the poor were used as slave labour, while those of the wealthy, their fates assigned by gender, were raised to be the agents of a supremacist empire.That children today remain the victims of power, indentured labour and sexual slavery, reaffirms the dark heart of this cliché — children must not and cannot be heard for fear that they will reveal the perverse core of our familial, educative, global-corporate core in which children, in one way or another, are systemically wronged.Better that they be seen, then, and not heard. And in this light perhaps photography, an optic that can further fix a child, objectify him or her, just might be yet another means through which their presence can be controlled.Emblematic of that most avidly sought-after elixir — youth — children are reminders of our lost pas...
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