Songs of innocence and experience

Artist Gayle Reynolds commented that Friday's entry in my parallel Today image log reminded her of a particular range of greetings cards. Gayle is a good friend and so it never occurred to me to be defensive about this; if the comment had come from most people, I would have felt a stab of insecurity, but not from Gayle. Nevertheless, it touched a tender spot which had given me some trouble at the time of posting that image.

To be honest, I dithered a long time before sending it. When I see a similar image from someone else, it usually make me cringe. As a viewer, I suspect that I would react in the same way to this one of my own – seeing it as posed and oozing sentimentality.

By coincidence, I had two days before read Philip Hensher's piece “The modern art of poetic licence” in The Independent of 27 July (full article not, unfortunately, available without subscription). It annoyed me: not in itself, but in the truth that it told. When Hensher says «If you painted a picture of St Paul's at sunset, you simply couldn't get anyone to take it seriously any more» he is simply stating a fact ... but a fact which I do not want to be true. It is intolerable that any subject, treatment or approach should be a no go area for artists simply because fashion is against it – but it is also, undeniably, so. That article has nothing to do with my taking or posting the 29th July picture (I realised the connection only after Gayle's observation) but the connection exists nonetheless.

I took that picture as a spur of the moment reaction to the event – an act of reportage. In retrospect, my feelings driving the instinct to record the moment were a mixture on the one hand of amused affection for the two children lost in their own world and on the other a vague horror born from my knowledge of how adults craft such moments into something which they are not. Honesty, despite my nervousness about being seen in a particular way (coward that I am), then made me post it.

Thinking about this, my reaction to such images is an adult one to be ashamed of: the sentimentality which I abhor in them is in the adults which capture, use and react to the image, not in the children depicted. To reject them as a class is to become complicit in exactly the sort of censorship which I condemn and which Hensher points out. I've learnt a lesson, perhaps, and hope that will look at such images in a different light in future.