School portraits feature at Mixed-up Childhood show

Expressions convey a wealth of personalities.

Photography plays a major role in Mixed-Up Childhood. Intentional or not, it is apt for an adult-oriented children's show to consider the implications of childhood through the nostalgically inclined medium of photography.

"I began to work as an artist when I began to be an adult, when I understood that my childhood was finished, and was dead," Christian Boltanski said in an interview with Tate magazine.

Boltanski's school portraits share the New Gallery with photographic works by Morton Bartlett, Anthony Goicolea, Loretta Lux, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Sally Mann, Steven Meisel, Tracey Moffatt and Yvonne Todd.

While most of these artists have created fantasy images through digital manipulation or concocting scenarios in an arranged tableau, Boltanski's work is a collection of dead-pan, head-and-shoulders portraits. But Boltanski rarely shoots his own photographs.

His work usually explores memory and history, highlighting the photographic trace of a moment captured on film. His installations often use found objects, including photographs, which raise questions about the identity and background of the subject, as well as the person who took the picture.

From the time the picture was taken and that moment preserved, the photographer and his subject have grown older, perhaps even died. Obituary pictures have been appropriated, and lost property claimed, all bearing testament to unknown lives.

Boltanski did take the pictures in Children of Westminster Community School, photographing the London school's new entrants, then exhibiting the pictures simultaneously in the school and in the adjacent Lisson Gallery.

The consistency of the images, in composition and clothing, highlights the diversity of this generational survey. Although still impressionable with years of social and academic moulding ahead of them, these are certainly not blank canvases.

Mischievous smirks, sullen pouts and slight variations in the ever-present school uniform demonstrate a wealth of personalities. The sense of mortality grows with time in Children of Westminster Community School. Although these are all young children, full of possibilities, 13 years have already passed since the pictures were taken.

Although we imagine the lives these children will lead, we must also consider the lives they have already lived, before the picture was taken and after. The school yearbook's "boy most likely to" could by now be "the boy who didn't".

Boltanski is Jewish and was born in France during World War II. Much of his work makes reference to the lives lost during the Holocaust. Collections of abandoned personal effects suggest an ominous absence even more effectively than the lists of names on memorial stones.

The element of the unknown is most prominent in his work, usually the stories of strangers, which even Boltanski can only guess at. Although he sets up potential narratives, the details are hazily elusive. The only certainty is mortality.

Boltanski's images, however spritely, seem to have escaped time but become only blurry memories confirming its constant march.

Exhibition

*What: Christian Boltanski in Mixed-Up Childhood
*Where and When: New Gallery, to May 29