viz.

All images by James Mollison, in Where Children Sleep, downloaded from VisualNews.com

This photograph is part of James Mollison's book Where Children Sleep, which features 56 similar diptychs and is, as Mollison states, an attempt to engage with children's rights via an inclusive vision of the diversity of places children sleep. Mollison intended the book for children aged 9-13. He states that he wanted to photograph each child away from where he or she sleeps and in front of a neutral background to show them "as equals, just as children." The variety of sleeping places (the simple inability to write "bedrooms" is, itself, telling) are, Mollison notes, "inscribed with the children's material and cultural circumstances."

I can easily imagine multiple pedagogical uses for these arresting photographs. For the target audience, what better way to get children to contemplate socioeconomic diversity than through comparison with something they no doubt have never given much though to? By grounding the lesson in something as intimate as where one sleeps, with the attendant expression of identity common to bedrooms, the photographs carry great emotional power. There are examples of excess and predominantly one-note identities:

There are also images of povery like the opening image for this post:

Although Mollison notes that he wants the children to stand as equals before the neutral background, I'm not convinced he succeeds. The traces of their material and cultural embeddedness are never fully erased. Clothes, tools, bags, jewelry, and other accoutrements invariably mark each child. Rather than a shocking discongruity, the two images in each diptych seem, for the most part, to fit. Each child appears removed from her or his environment, but not essentially separate from it. Does this visual continuity between child and sleeping place represent a failure on the artist's part or the impossibility of the task?