Most of my photos from early childhood, I’m naked. My favorite game was always dress up but dressing down was never a problem either. And my parents never cared. Yes my parents leaned more to the liberal pseudo-hippy side than towards conservatism but they weren’t any sort of radicals and I grew up in a standard suburb just like millions of other people. I just wasn’t raised with any sort of Victorian paranoia about nudity.
I was raised with the concept that nakedness is natural and nothing to be ashamed of. We are all born naked and clothes are essentially a social construct. Yes, for society to maintain it’s status quo we all must learn when and where nudity is socially apropos but children have not learned these lessons yet and they should not be punished or ridiculed for their inexperience. To be a child is to experience exuberance at exploring all of the newness of the world and that also means exploring ones own body as a changing, growing, and radically new thing as well.
Wyatt Neumann is capturing the experience that his daughter is living and he has the great fortune as a parent to observe and document. Every single parent I know has naked pictures of their children. Most parents keep their photos in coffee table albums to bring out and embarrass their children in adolescence; they don’t all happen to have a large audience and a photographers lens. But really everyone has naked baby pictures. Anyone who has ever spent any real time with children knows that they lack the inhibitions of adults and often end up naked. Kids don’t care. They carry on with whatever game they are engaged in whether or not they are wearing pants.
When I was a child pretty much the only time I ever got in trouble at school was in second grade. I was sitting in class and I was hot. I knew not to disturb my class so I quietly wiggled out of my undershirt while keeping my over shirt on. I don’t remember my teacher saying anything to me at the time but I do have a very vivid memory of my dad being very upset that he had to have a meeting with my teacher and I was punished. That was when I learned that nudity wasn’t appropriate everywhere but I didn’t understand why because I had no concept of the social moors surrounding the naked body as a sexual object.
Really what I learned from getting in trouble for taking my shirt off was shame. It was the first lesson the world would show me about how I should be ashamed of my body because it made other people uncomfortable. I was seven. I did something completely innocent and yet I was punished and shamed for it. I sincerely doubt that my undershirt removal traumatized any of the kids in my class but I do know that this first experience of body shame and the many which would follow throughout my life greatly impacted my self-esteem and my feelings of self-worth.
It saddens me that people feel so negatively about their own bodies and sexuality that they have to project some sinister agenda on this exhibit. I believe in protecting children and nurturing them and embracing their growth and development; not damning them for their innocent exploration of the world. The sorts of comments that people chose to make about this little girl in her nakedness are potentially so damaging to her and while the publicness of this exhibit may also be challenging I think that it is positive that this father is defending her right to be a child, to have her experience, and his right to document and share it.
Misadventures & Musings 