JPP-IE.InnocentEyes.txt
Boys and girls,
In case you were wondering how comes I wrote such a big read-me: stop wondering, I didn't, most of this read-me is from the book "With Innocent Eyes". I have this book for a while now and am surprised that I haven't seen it posted before. Lucky me! While I was working on it, it kind of "grew on me" if that's the right expression, I liked it better and better the further I got with it. I hope you feel the same when looking at these pictures. All pictures are nudes.
I will post the book in three instalments, this is the first. I conclude with the preface from the book which is not necessarily my own view.
Please enjoy these pictures.
"Johnie"
With Innocent Eyes, preface:
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The photographs in this collection were made by an American photographer in the early 1960's. In 1967 a few of his photographs were issued as posters by a New York publisher, and in early 1968 a book, to be entitled "Almost Eight", which was to include many of these pictures, was announced by the same firm. Before it came out, the company went bankrupt. The manuscript was sold, or perhaps the photographer himself later sold additional copies of the prints, for between 1967 and 1971 some of the pictures appeared in magazines. But the magazine publisher never systematically used the material, and eventually it went into a damp storage area in the back of the warehouse; about the same time the photographer evidently dropped from sight. In 1986, during a bankruptcy sale, the prints were rediscovered by a New York dealer. Diligent inquiries have failed to locate any current information about the photographer.
The photographs possess a complex innocence. It is a compound of the artlessness of the photographer's approach, the absence of self-consciousness in his subjects, and the perceptions of society in the time from which they come.
A part of this innocence can be attributed to the artistic naivete of the photographer. Although evidently technically skilled, he does not appear to have approached his subject with any conscious artistic plan; instead he trusted his eye. Many of his photographs, though worthy of preservation, are conventional. But occasionally, particularly in his studio work, he sees the boy in a radically fresh way. Neither static nor sentimental, these studies do not refer to Greek or nineteenth century academic models - or, in the case of outdoor studies where this happens, to popular culture images of the swimming hole - but have a spontaneity and energy that is like that of the boys themselves.
Another dimension of innocence can be felt in the outdoor studies. It was the photographer's good fortune to be able to look in the unaffected world of the boys. They are not presented as objects for the viewer; they are not posed, nor indeed do they self-consciously pose. The photographer is unobtrusive; the boys go about their business, exploring their world or reflecting upon it, seemingly without regard for his presence. Within this context, their nudity (though obviously requested by the photographer) does not seem contrived, but makes them at one with their natural surroundings.
These photographs were taken in another time, that saw children's nudity with entirely different eyes. In the 1970's, well after these photographs were taken, sexualised images of children - since labelled "kiddie porn" - came and went. Indeed, it is likely that these photographs were relegated to their storage cabinet because the publisher felt they could not compete commercially with such material. We have also since been instructed to scrutinise such images of children through the lens of power relationships, as "abuse". Created before all this, such concerns are foreign to these images, absent from the thought of the photographer and the society that first viewed them. The photographs here are truly innocent pictures, in a way that nude studies of a boy can never be innocent again.
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