photo by Collyn Ware

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of.
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

Perhaps novelist Ian McEwan is right. Perhaps we love the medium of photography because it offers us the gift of frozen narrative, of an illusion of innocence. When our memories begin to fade, when our rotting, ripening world crushes in upon us with all its death and disease, when we find ourselves waking with more dread than hope, a single photograph can remind us of a time of permanence and immortality. It can return us to a snowy field at dusk, to a boy who spreads his arms to the world as if to say: Here I am. Right here in the center of everything where the future kneels before me, a bright, expectant promise. Right here where the moon is my subject, where the darkness, a futile foe, will ever cower at the edges of my life.

One of the greatest joys of my life is living vicariously through my grandson’s exuberant innocence. When he talks of riding bulls professionally on the rodeo circuit, I’m all in. When he speculates about the color of Bugatti he will buy when he gets his driver’s licence, I can see it. When he announces that these past few 50-degree days have been nice enough to fill the pool, I’m smelling the sunscreen and feeling the heat. When he asks if we should make a leprechaun trap again this year, I’m already considering the supplies we’ll need. Of course, these days will not last. At eight, he’s undoubtedly older than many who’ve already lost the innocence that continues to buoy him through his days. And I’m grateful for this innocence. For, as Pablo Picasso said, it takes a very long time to become young, and I find that I’m just coming into my own through him.

I realize that the life expectancy of innocence is often largely dependent upon circumstances. Poverty, instability, disease, violence and war can snuff out innocence before it really ever begins. For children in such circumstances, there may be no photographs that freeze a narrative worth preserving. There may be no photgraphs at all. Innocence may have briefly flickered, only to be extinguished by the loss of family, home, or country.

But I am one of the fortunate. As a Baby Boomer, I grew up after the Depression and World Wars and before 9/11 and Covid. I grew up in relative peace and prosperity, an era during which innocence could live a comfortable and long life. I was 14 when I discovered hypocrisy among my peers who’d cheated their way through our church’s confirmation class only to stand later among the confirmed as the congregation smiled and applauded. I remember feeling truly shocked, my innocence decidedly beginning to unravel. Still, I had a good run while it lasted. When my innocence truly gave way to a growing sense of worldliness, it happened naturally, gradually, and without calamity.

Today, it often seems as though we want to rush innocence’s demise. We want our children to enter kindergarten with several years of reading and math under their little belts. We want our middle school students to chart career paths and plan their adult lives. We want our high school students to graduate with both high school diplomas and two-year college degrees, so that they might potentially begin law or medical school at age 19. It goes without saying that innocence struggles to survive when the academic stakes and cultural expectations are so high so soon. In such an environment, it must necessarily die young.

As a high school English teacher, I taught dual-credit courses in composition, speech, and literature. In the beginning, I had 16 out of 112 students in my school. At the end of my career, nearly 2/3 of the senior class took dual-credit college courses. Although many of these students were ready enough academically, many weren’t ready socially and emotionally. Some admitted that they just wanted to enjoy their senior year: by participating in sports and other activities, by hanging out with friends they would soon leave behind when they left for college, and by resting in the comfort of a school and home environment they knew and trusted. Without saying as much, they were admitting that they weren’t really ready and didn’t relish the rigor of college courses. At that time, parents paid college tuition–fully or partially–for their students’ enrollment in these courses. Because of this, I felt it was my moral and professional duty to advise such students not to enroll in college courses while they were in high school. After all, I reasoned, they had the time and the opportunity to take these same courses during theirr freshman year at college. Years later, however, these courses became free (hence the increased enrollment), and these same arguments largely fell on deaf ears. Even if students weren’t mature enough or academically ready to handle college courses, parents and counselors argued that they should take them because they were free, because their peers were taking them, and because they’d be left behind if they didn’t.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that we would rush children and teens through childhood and innocence and fix their eyes more quickly on adulthood. It’s true that in centuries past, teens left school early (if they attended at all), married, and began adult lives at the age of 13 or 14. And it’s true that even as children, they were often expected to work at home if the family was to survive. But as a Boomer, I never knew this hardship; as Americans, we generally don’t know this hardship today. One might argue that, in light of the fact that people live much longer today, we should ask ourselves some tough questions: Why should we rush childhood and the innocence that should–for a time, at least–accompany it? What do really stand to gain in encouraging more young people to graduate and enter the workforce early? As we rush our youth to adulthood, are we prepared to give them more and more adult privileges and responsibilities?

In his novel, All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy writes:

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.

As insignificant as it may seem, I do remember how my world shifted when I realized my classmates had lied and cheated. And I remember a similar situation when one of my students discovered her peers had copied answers from her test paper. She came to me, crying. Can you believe it, Mrs. Vesely? They were my friends, and they used me! My student and I were both teens when the truths of life began to rear their painful heads. But what if we’d been children? And what if our 6 or 8-year-old worlds hadn’t just shifted but shattered? Would we have had the courage to face our futures, the heart to start at all? Would we have become painfully aware, as children, that we’d never become bull riders or figure skaters, that leprechaun traps and cookies for Santa were just the fictional figments of someone’s foolish imagination, that the world was never–not even once–ours for the taking? Would our innocence have died, as writer Joan Didion claims, when we were stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself?

Perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves of how precious little time we spend as innocents and of the consequences of further reducing that time. It all might start with taping a single photograph to our refrigerators or bathroom mirrors. A photograph that freezes a narrative of what-might-be, a confidence in the world which appears to be, at that moment, ripe for the picking. A photograph of a boy or girl with arms flung wide in bright, expectant promise.