By SHAUNA ANDERSON
A dark haired olive skinned two-year old girl with an impish grin wiggles her toes delightedly as she squirms in front of the camera.
Her daisy print knickers stretch across her ankles and her wavy hair blows in the breeze. She’s laughing delightedly, posing for the camera without a trace of awareness as she sits on her potty.
Photo credit: Wyatt Neumann
We’ve all taken these images of our kids – the cheeky ones, the potty training ones, the bare-skinned beauty ones.
Because that’s how we see our children. Innocent. Unaware. Carefree.
The adorable little girl in these pics is Stella, and the glorious picture was taken by her dad, Wyatt Neumann, Neumann is a photographer who captured a series of startlingly beautiful images during a road trip they took together.
Many people would describe the images as delightful. But some people – a large group of people in fact – didn’t see a small girl enjoying the feeling of her fairy dress billowing in the wind.
They saw “pornography”.
They didn’t see a little tot crouched on a road against a fierce sky.
They saw “perversity”.
Photo credit: Wyatt Neumann
They didn’t see a joyous two-year old bouncing on a bed.
They saw “abuse” and “disgust”.
Photo credit: Wyatt Neumann
Neumann told The Huffington Post he was shocked when the group turned their focus to his online gallery of the father/daughter road trip.
The bombardment saw his images removed from Facebook and from Instagram. Neumann’s website was also targeted.
“The whole thing is sickening and I FEEL SORRY FOR YOUR CHILDREN,” one commenter wrote.
“Way to serve your daughter up on a plate, sicko. I will be sure to email you directly when I find this image being traded on the deep web, Wyatt,” was another,
Neumann told The Huffington Post that he was “open to others expressing their opinions about his work” but that the “forced censorship” went too far.
“The reality for me was that these people could actually affect my ability to express myself. They took down my Instagram and Facebook; those are huge digital platforms for a photographer. It had a physical effect on my ability to communicate with people. The fact that they had that ability to control my experience in this life made me want to fight back. I really believe that the work is beautiful and [reveals] the innocence of childhood.”
So fight back he did.
He decided to use the words of the haters and juxtapose them with his photos. The result is a bittersweet indictment of the poison typewriters that can come with online anonymity.
Check it out here.
Neumann told The Huffington Post that he wanted to show the images to the world the way he saw them when he took them — as innocent, carefree loving moments of time.
“The naked bodies of carefree young children, who have yet to feel the burden of institutionalized body image awareness and the embarrassment that comes with adolescence. My children are free, they live without shame.”
Sure, Wyatt Neuman is one step away from the rest of us who take pictures of our children every day in that has a commercial motive — but how is he any different from Rembrandt painting pictures of his son Titus, or Rubens painting his son Peter Paul?
Back then these artists may not have had Facebook to profile their works in but they did have the great galleries of the world.
You have to wonder how someone can see a loving image of a toddler naked and think perversity and disgust? You have to wonder why our paranoia about our children has reached such fever-pitch.
Whether in the 16th century or in 2014 it is the interpretation of the art surely that says more about the eye of the beholder than the eye of the man behind the art itself.
What do you think about Wyatt Neumann’s photos?
Top Comments
I see the innocence, fun and joy of a playing child. The ones who see (or want to see) porn in these photographs, clearly have some unresolved issues to deal with. Looks to me the haters are projecting their own fears/experiences (or worse) onto the photographer. I root for the guy with the camera. Beautiful work.
So sad that people have reacted negatively over these gorgeous photos and childhood innocence. Society has become too hung-up on nudity - especially when it comes to naked children. I could not get my children to keep their clothes on when they were age two and three. They felt no shame, no embarrassment, no reason to fear being seen "as nature intended". They simply felt uncomfortable in their clothes, so they took them off! I think that rather than Neumann being a "sick fuck", the ones who labelled him as such are the ones who need help.