`Een jongen en zijn staat', in Mensen Kijken,
edited by Kees Bruin et al, Amsterdam: Walters-Nordhoff, 1998: 106-109.
Published in 1911, these two photos have always stuck in my mind as representing
some very fundamental questions concerning social change, state formation,
progress, civilisation and the intersection of all of these with individual
human lives. They appeared in the Annual Report of the New South Wales State
Children Relief Board, a pair of `before and after' shots intended to communicate
to the world what the State's child welfare agency was doing. It was a visual
representation of the descriptions and arguments contained in the surrounding
text concerning the production of `good and useful men and women', the prevention
of crime and poverty, and the moral improvement of neglected and abused
children.
The first photo, then, represents life before state intervention, a particular
social and moral state of potential as well as actual degeneration, viciousness,
poverty and barbarism. The absence of discipline and virtue is clear from
the skewed cap, the absence of socks and shoes, the untidy clothing, shorts
clearly home-made by cutting the ends of long trousers, sleeves too short,
dirty face, sullen, disobedient look. The message to the likely reader of
the Annual Report is clear, all the elements of the image combine to communicate
`Neglect'. This was the problematic `raw material' the state had to deal
with.
In the second photo, the effects of state intervention are communicated
in a variety of ways. The hat is placed symmetrically on the boy's head,
the clothing clearly of higher quality, complete with white collar, socks,
shows, sleeves the right length, buttons on his shorts. A piece of luggage
appears to indicate a greater weight to the boy's life, a gathering of possessions
to which, we can only hope, he will be sufficiently attached to be wary
of their loss, wary enough to heed the advice of his elders and betters.
His life is now `heavier', more solid, more anchored in the world of things
and through them the world of social relations. He is placed before a doorway
to some house or building - it doesn't matter which one, because what we
see and feel is the connection to some interior, like the luggage an anchoring
of the boy's life in a stable social context, one where there is a distinction
and the private at all. All the readers of the Annual Report would have
been aware that this was precisely the problem in the family lives of so
many street children, the absence of a `home' or a private domesticity in
their lives.
How did the transformation take place? We can only assume through the experience
of being in the care of the state, some set of influences exerted upon this
boy's personality, even his body, some civilizing project which took him
from one state into the other. An extraordinary ambition, really, to remake
a human being, to deliberately and consciously turn this boy from one sort
of person into another through sheer force of will, intelligence, astuteness
and insightfulness. Not a civilizing process, this was a civilizing project,
and on a larger scale part of a civilizing offensive, aimed at bringing
about what social life could not, or at least not quickly enough.
But, we are left with more questions than answers. Is it likely that this
transformation did actually take place? What happened to the hat, the shoes,
the good clothes, the luggage when the photographer packed his equipment
away? Most of the historical evidence suggests they went back whence they
came, ready to be pulled out for the next act of representing the Board's
good work. In other words, we have here a portrayal of an ambition for civilisation,
a will to discipline, rather than any sense of what actually happened in
this boy's life. There would have been a wide range of possible trajectories
for him - he may have been taken into a kind foster family, learnt a trade,
become apprenticed at an early age, and gone on to lead a happy and productive
life, looking back on his childhood in the care of the state, this movement
from shoelessness to civility, with fondness. Or he may have been regularly
beaten, both within an institution staffed by ex-teachers and later by his
drunken foster father. Trying to escape both, he may have flirted with some
petty criminal activity, and found his way into the criminal justice system,
from which he never permanently escaped.