Tierney Gearon is an American photographer that blew up when the public thought her work to be controversial because of the use of her naked children. She has done series of works that follow her kids, her mother, and herself. Gearon uses a Mamiya 7, which is a medium format camera that is very expensive. We just watched a documentary video on her in our darkroom class and I became fascinated with her. She is such a free spirit yet she will do anything for a picture. Many people call her selfish and that she doesn't care about her children the way she should. Coming from an art student's perspective, I see it as using the resources you have to make the best art possible, but I know from a mother's perspective, how she exposes her kids is very wrong.
I think Tierney Gearon makes the work that she does because she has some sort of tunnel vision that only allows her to look at the world as everything having an opportunity to photograph. In the documentary, every moment of her kids' and her mother's lives were being documented and she was never without a camera in hand. She will do anything to get the image she wants and has battled with herself in response to people telling her that she's a bad mother. No matter what he reasoning is, Tierney Gearon is an amazing artist that deserves respect for her work.
Researcher M. J. Goldstein (1973) asked a sample of pedophile subjects and a sample of control subjects how often they were exposed to nudity, whether real or portrayed, during their younger years. The pedophile subjects had significantly fewer such experiences.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, children in the Muria tribe of India are welcome to live in a
building known as a "ghotul," which stands outside every village. There, all of the children live from about the age of ten until marriage. The children of both sexes eat, dress, undress, sleep, and swim naked in the river together, and without adult interference (Kamat [2002] 2018). Consequently, the children grow up free from the hang-ups which plague our society (Elwin 1991:200).
I think that if we had more parents like Tierney Gearon, we would have fewer pedophiles.
Elwin, V. 1991. The Murias and their ghotul. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goldstein, M. J. 1973. Exposure to erotic stimuli and sexual deviance. Journal of Social Issues 29, 3: 197-219.
Kamat, K. L. [2002] 2018. The ghotul system of education.
http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/bastar/ghotul.htm