Childhood Fears

The strange thing about childhood fears is that no matter how fantastical or improbably the threat, to a child that fear is real. The fear is a happening, tangible emotion even if the frightening cause does not actually exist. The propspect of imminent danger, real or imagined, has the potential to overwhelm a child and cause them to confuse fantasy with reality in situations that adults could otherwise rationalise. It is this confused perception of fears in the form of unknown happenings and mysterious occurrences that form the basis of suggested narratives in the latest series of photographs by Samantha Everton.

Everton has used the techniques of montage to construct melancholic images of children performing in uncanny situations that slip between the real and the constructed. Abandoned birthday parties, shadow plays in retro interiors and midnight wanders – these are the settings in which the children perform their strange acts.

The photographs are produced using traditional, analogue film and then manipulated in post-production, the final photograph being a composite of around five different images. The digital manipulation is seamless, but what appears plausible at first glance soon unravels to reveal intentional confusion in the visual narratives. The repetition of certain backdrops, props and characters pushes this uncertainty further, conflating time and events in a manner reminiscent of a recurring dream in which visual motifs repeat but in altered and warped formations. Everton has used illogical light sources, diffusing the images with a green glow, in precisely staged tableaux – aesthetic devices that reference film (think David Lynch) and music videos. The odd stillness of the scenes also appears to be an intentional ploy that is reminiscent of both the long exposures of typical 19th-century portraits and the cinematic, creating heightened anticipation of what is to come.

Everton’s work continues a recent trend among female Australian photographers such as Deborah Paauwe, Sharon Green and Polixeni Papapetrou of using child and adolescent subjects to amplify a sense of the uncanny, often with an underlying sense of danger. And yet, as with other photographers, Everton seems reluctant to engage with the direct emotional ramifications of the threat – instead the children in her images retain a passivity, ambivalence and even complicity in the face of these fears and their possible cause. Two young girls, for example, stand together in the darkness before a parked car with a male drive at the wheel but their body language appears calm; one of these girls in another image stands alone, outdoors at night, wearing a flimsy white dress but her hair obstructs her face and her emotions – we do not see the signs of fear or vulnerability that are otherwise suggested by the evocative title of the series or the staged aesthetic.

Perhaps these works, in which the childrens’ anxieties are concealed and obstructed, exist in reaction to the current MySpace/YouTube generation in which emotions are laid out so publicly, conversations and dreams exposed, obituaries all but written. Everton has constructed scenes that appear to tap into an imaginary, secretive realm of the inner fears and imaginings of childhood as perceived by an adult, and yet seems hesitant to broach what the cause or effect of these apparent fears might be. Instead, we are left to wonder about the reason for these melancholic performances, and query the photographer’s intention in presenting these complex perceptions of reality, dreams, fears and fantasies.