Photography And Fish (Fingers)

'Mirroring the way in which Lux dresses her models and fixes them in front of a background of her own choice, we cloth these figures in our own fantasies, and superimpose our narratives of childhood onto the backdrop they provide.'  J L Fletcher (2005) Loretta Lux: Spellbound in Portfolio Magazine No 42, , pp 4-11

Loretta Lux is well-known for her 'uncanny' images of children; digitally-manipulated, with limbs and features stangely enlarged or elongated. The pictures are certainly intriguing, even if the reasons for their popularity may be potentially disturbing and disconcerting.

Take The Fish (2003).  It is a desolate and desperate image. Dirty walls and filthy floor tiles: the water in the stained and grimy bath-tub is a cold slate-grey. The child's lilac frock is also stained, on the collar and close to its hem.  Somnambulant, her eyes are closed; soft-skinned and puppy-fat, she holds her pose and her breath as well.

Loretta Lux, 2003, The Fish

The Buhl Foundation is home to collection of over 1000 photographs by seminal and little-known photographers. Ranging in date from 1840 to the present day, what unites this seemingly disparate array of images is the motif of the hand; Buhl's first purchase, made in 1993, was Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe entitled Hands with a Thimble (1920). Buhl's rationale for collecting is not so different from Dyer's approach to writing the history of photography.

In her catalogue essay accompanying an exhibition of Buhl's collection at the Guggenheim Museum, Jennifer Blessing cites Michel de Montaigne, who asks in An Apology for Raymond Sebond: '[A]nd what about our hands?' Montaigne then lists all that our hands express, including how they can 'lament; show sadness, grieve, despair, astonish, cry out, keep silent . . . '.

The cruelly-clawed and crippling tension in the hands of Diane Arbus' Child With a Toy Grenade is far more powerful than the grimace on the boy's face.

Diane Arbus, 1962,

Child With A Toy Grenade, Central Park, New York

The hand that holds the fish in Lux's image registers nothing of the pain and anxiety that we read into Arbus' photograph, but the potential trauma of childhood still signifies: in the motif of the fish. A fish out of water very quickly suffocates and dies.