Where Children Sleep by James Mollison (September 2018)
Mollison’s collection is a series of photographs showing where children sleep all around the world. It was a quick read and I zipped through the collection over a couple of nights at the end of September. The photography demonstrates the significant variation of childhood experience – some bedrooms were awash in excess while others were just a comfortable sleeping space. Some bedrooms weren’t bedrooms at all, these running the gamut from a dining room that converted at night into a family sleeping area to a tattered mattress partially hidden by trees in an otherwise open field.
They say a picture speaks a thousand words but I felt the most powerful feature of this collection were the short bios of each child. These were included on the page preceding the photograph of the child’s sleeping area and the bios often explained the context of what came in the accompanying photograph. One occasionally surprising aspect of these descriptions was how they contradicted my initial assumption about a bedroom, the most memorable of these being the revelation that one of the crumbling roofs featured was not from a poor third-world country but was rather from right here in my own United States.
The bios also created little juxtapositions among the children featured that made this a difficult read at times – the starving trash picker and the obese sumo wrestler, for example, or the runaway child soldier and the child who hunts for sport. Using preteen children as examples has an interesting effect because it strips away the usual arguments of self-determination or personal responsibility that are invoked anytime an adult makes decisions that are unhealthy or lives a lifestyle that harms the surrounding community. Instead, all a reader is left with is the understanding that there are countless children out there from every community on the planet that are systemically being left behind, reduced, or erased by the failures of the societies they just happen to grow up in.
