Welcome to the lecture on the photography by Melbourne artist Polixeni Papapetrou. This series of work is titled Dreamchild, where Polixeni’s now six year old daughter Olympia, is photographed re-enacting the lives of the young girls photographed by the 19th century photographer Charles Dodgson, who is better known as Lewis Carroll, the writer of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

When Polixeni first encountered Lewis Carroll’s tableaux vivant style Victorian photographs of young English children, she was fascinated by their otherworldliness, but also by the subversive and radical underlying circumstances within these seemingly gentle scenes.

Through the games of dress-up and performative acts that occurred before his camera, Carroll created photographs of young girls who transcended and reversed categories of identity, such as race, ethnicity, gender and class, marked visually through the appearance of ‘Otherness’.

The young girls colluded in the illusion—through the use of theatricality and a simple childish game of dress-ups, Carroll suspended disbelief and allowed his child subjects to transform into other—to destabilize identity—to cross boundaries and become children of another class.

This kind of cross dressing was an accepted practice in English theatre, and Carroll’s photographs of reversing gender and class roles, was not so radical as to have offended Victorian sensibilities.

The young girls he photographed were complicit in the boundary crossing illusion: female upper class English girls were photographed as Chinese men, as a Turkish maid, as ancient Greeks, as beggar children or as high caste Indians. Carroll’s own representation of the child, effectively caused a disruption to the Victorian understanding of childhood identity, self and self-hood by encouraging his subjects to dress-up and explore other identities outside of their own privileged class system.
It is Polixeni’s interest in the portrayal of childhood emerging from how experience as a mother and artist and in her interest in the historical and contemporary representations of the child in art, that has partly led her to make this work.

Polixeni says that although the child has been depicted in a variety of ways since photography’s inception, and our culture is ever-increasingly tolerant of different types of sexual representation in the media, it is especially sensitive and vigilant about the representation of children especially when they are depicted in the nude.

She sees that contemporary Western culture is in a predicament over the portrayal of children in photography. Prior to the invention of photography, the idea of childhood innocence had been infused into popular consciousness, and these 'visual habits' were adopted into photography, but unlike the history of aristocratic painted portraiture—which often gives to children the authority of adults, contemporary photographs of children are often embarrassing.

Polixeni has observed that the child (and sometimes the photographer) has been demeaned by a language of cuteness that fetishizes the powerlessness of the child or, similarly, in a frozen moment, the child is captured in a form of trivial innocence. However, judging by volume and popular acceptance, this is the type of photography that does not offend.

As an example, Polixeni points out the photographs by Anne Geddes, who makes images of excessively cute babies and children in various costumes for reproduction in calendars, greeting cards, posters, note-pads, and coffee table books.
Her costumed babies metamorphosize into beings from celestial places or from nature: such as angels from heaven, bees, cats and flowers. The sex of the babies is unknown as their genitalia is always concealed and thus boy and girl disappear into the baby body.

Polixeni notes that the absence of genitalia from Geddes’ photographs is curious. To reveal the genitalia of infants could spoil this carefully contrived and commercially popular image of asexual, cute, angelic, cherubic and innocent babies. Geddes’ photographs of babies appeal to the general public as they do not disturb moral sensibilities.
The notion of romantic childhood has been marshalled into twentieth century iconography, and especially photography because of our absolute belief in photography's objective neutrality. Polixeni however does not see photography as neither objective, nor neutral.

She writes that she is interested in exploring these themes. Without saying that she has any solutions to offer, Polixeni as the artist does not see this as her role. She sees her role as making photographs that explore different aspects of childhood and the child’s imagination.

As a mother and artist she is interested in the ways her daughter portrays herself as a female child and her imaginative experimentation with roles, archetypes, and performance. Polixeni is interested in exploring Olympia’s psychological and physical individuality in her work, and also the consequences of presenting these more realistic images of children.

In exploring these ideas Polixeni has photographed Olympia in a number of ways - with various masks, play acting roles and types, by re-staging the works of Lewis Carroll; and in her latest body of work titled The Secret Child, where Polixeni is staging Lewis Carroll’s wonderland stories.

For this exhibition Dreamchild, Polixeni had the idea of re-staging Carroll’s fancy dress photographs as they embody and symbolize the themes that she has explored in her previous bodies of work. Previously Polixeni has photographed fanatical Elvis Presley fans, Marilyn Monroe impersonators and body builders. These series were concerned with the representation of identity, and how popular culture becomes incorporated into daily life and how it is bound up with identity.

In this show, Polixeni is fascinated by the representation of childhood and self hood and the boundary crossing that occurs in photography through the performative acts that take place before the camera.

Polixeni describes how she witnesses Olympia as she experiments with and determines who she is, or how she wants to be seen for the purposes of the photographic image. Polixeni says that like an artist, Olympia seems to be both conscious and naïve about the communicative result of her acts.

She perhaps follows the normal cultural pattern by which we expect the representation of children to be cute and for children to heighten their cuteness by making innocent eyes in the theatrical and disingenuous context of make-believe.

Sometimes, Olympia’s acts gain cuteness by attempting to mimic the ways of adults, with unlikely moral attachments. In the cultural fib of play-acting, Olympia’s stark mise-en-scènes seem to allegorise photography itself, half candid, half guileful and always referring to an imperfectly assimilated prototype.

Polixeni says that “The work I am making about Olympia is not the result of conscious fulfilment of my projections, but a moment created by Olympia and sparked off by her imagination that began when she was a three year old.

It was with Olympia’s insistence, that she began to be photographed by her Mother. Polixeni remembers one day, while she was preparing to photograph someone else, that Olympia spontaneously asked to be photographed. In the first photographs Polixeni took of her, Olympia wanted to be photographed with her pacifiers, but since then she has wanted to be photographed with other revered personal objects, in various costumes as part of a dress up game and also in the nude.

Simultaneous to photographing Dreamchild, Polixeni and Olympia have been working on a series titled Phantomwise. These large black and white photographs show Olympia wearing a reproduced Victorian mask and elaborate costumes.
This project began in 2001 when Olympia was 4 1/2 and asked her Mum to ‘photo her’, which is her expression for wanting to be photographed. The last photograph in this series was made just after she turned six in this year.

Polixeni says that she was interested in making these photographs of her as they raised some interesting ideas such as how the simple game of dress-ups expresses the performance of identity that often occurs in childhood. The mask enables Olympia to act paradoxically, to cross boundaries, but to somehow remain herself. The mask performs a symbolic function in the photograph revealing the transformation from the physical to the metaphysical and from the real to the imaginary.

Polixeni explains that she has used the masks in the photographs not only as a theatrical prop to change Olympia’s appearance, but also as a metaphor for transformation that allows her to cross boundaries and enter into other territories. The masks used are half masks, which conceal her face from above the nose, but allow her mouth and ears to be revealed. The eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are fully drawn in the mask. A small eyehole in place of the pupil enables Olympia to see.

Each mask used conveys a different ethnicity, gender, age, type or period from history and Olympia enters into these realms by adopting the persona of the mask. For example, in Olympia as a Chinese Mandarin 2001, Olympia is photographed wearing the mask of a Chinese man; she is in traditional male Chinese costume, standing with legs apart and holding a parasol beside her body. In this photograph Olympia is male, she is Chinese, she is an adult and she is placed somewhere in nineteenth-century China.

The masks depicting female characters similarly transport Olympia into these other realms. In Olympia as Indian Squaw 2002 Olympia is photographed wearing the clothing of an American Indian Squaw and seated upright on a blanket projecting a sense of pride. Her hair is plaited and she is looking off to the side. Olympia has become American Indian; she could be in her teens or early twenties and the blanket signifies that her people have been trading with white Americans. In this photograph she is placed in the mid to late nineteenth century and possibly the early twentieth century.