The image shows only the backs of her legs, you can not see the rest of her at all, there is no indication of her facial expression or anything to tell us that she might or might not be dead. Here is the rest of what followed from me opening the page that caught my 8 year old brothers eye.
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| Kate Moss - By Juergan Teller |
I want to talk about my brother and his reaction to this very image. As I was looking through the book for images to use for my self portraits of my legs my brother stopped me at this image and said to me 'That's a dead person', there was no question in his voice he knew just by the way that her legs were positioned and the way that the image had been cropped, so you were unable to see her face that this was a picture of a dead woman.
I asked way he thought this as I knew that this was not a dead woman but an image of the famous model Kate Moss from the small print under the image. His response was 'cos they are lying on their front and if they were on their back they would be alive'.
Its fascinating how honest children are they have concept of time or death yet they can see and understand what death might look like, I guess you could say that the era that we live in has something to do with this, that children are more exposed to these kind of images, whether on the news or in TV and Film.
But this might not necessarily be true. Through out our lives when growing up we must try to learn our way around the world and this is mainly done by images and what we see in the world around us. We have to try to understand the things we see, with the little amount of experience we have. Yet with what we do have we can begin to draw our conclusions on the world until we learn other wise.
To prove this point have a clip of John Bergers Ways of Seeing Program - Episode 4
at 2:39 he discusses how child relate their own experiences to images.
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