Kids are free and magical and not inhibited by the cultural boundaries we all are. His work is brilliant and gorgeous–the way he captures childhood in this fleeting way. “People box parenthood into such a small realm of what we’re supposed to be with our children,” she told me. Author Bidwell Smith thought she had made that point when she shared her friend’s pictures. It’s painfully obvious that Neumann not only loves his children, but is also a present, involved and nurturing father. I got to know him through the artifacts he left.” My life with my father is something I lived through in photos.
#LITTLE LS MODELS NUDE ARCHIVE#
He’s creating an archive for his kids and who am I to judge him for sharing it? “I was raised on a hippie commune,” he says.
Neumann, whose own father died before he could get to know him, errs on the side of openness. These days, whenever I take a photo of my kids, ages 6 and 9, they invariably say “Don’t put that on Facebook!” or “Let me choose the filter before you put it on Instagram.” I let them call the shots, most of the time. But even then, it would have most likely been on Facebook where at least I am given the illusion that I can control who has access to the pictures. When they were younger I might have shared a bathtub shot or two, or one of them copping a potty-training squat. I certainly don’t post any photos of mine undressed or, for that matter, doing anything I think they’d find compromising in the future. We all have our own rules about how much we’ll share of our kids’ lives online. Rather than retreat, I pushed forward and turned it into a beautiful art show.”Īnyone with a child has hundreds of these kinds of snapshots on a smartphone. The more this conservative, puritanical, fundamentalist ideology starts to permeate our culture it’s compressing our ability to express ourselves. “They wanted to take away my ability to do that. “What they wanted me to do was stop posting photos,” he told me at his exhibit which opened last month. In the worst instances, commenters have accused Neumann of trading in kiddie porn. But there are multiple references to pedophiles in the Instagram comments to his photos. “The Internet is for porn,” goes the famous line from the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q–and most of the time I’m the last person to complain about it. And maybe there is something slightly tragic to be said about the Internet having conditioned us all to look at things through smut-colored glasses. I wonder if these people - protected by the anonymity the Internet provides - would have been less quick to assault the parent’s character if it was Stella’s mother who posted the photos. It was clearly too much for some to stomach.
From there the images made their way to the online message board Get Off My Internets.Īnd then came the hate: Parenting trolls descended with a vengeance, flagging so many of his pictures that his account was suspended mid-roadtrip - 6,000 photos gone - but not before flooding his posts and inbox with hate speech and insults. His friend Claire Bidwell Smith, author of the best-selling memoir “The Rules of Inheritance,” told her own Instagram followers to check them out.
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The roadtrip photos - Stella in her carseat Stella using a portable training potty at a roadside pitstop Stella eating barbeque - were first posted to his Instagram account. It’s a beautiful image, but does it belong in a public venue frequented by perverts and prudes alike? Here’s where I land: However uncomfortable a given photo may make me feel, I would be even less comfortable telling someone they can’t post it. Pictures like the one of his daughter sitting between his legs in a bathtub might trigger a twinge of discomfort for the candidness and intimacy they capture. But you wouldn’t necessarily have that context if you were to stumble upon his photos online somewhere for the first time. Neumann happens to be an award-winning fine art photographer with commercial clients like Reebok and Visa. And yet, the photos raise an interesting question about how much we share about our kids on social media.
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