The Face in Visual Representations of Children

Introduction

In December 2017, I gave a presentation with two colleagues in front of knowledge users for a project on the ‘Sixties Scoop’, a period of mass forced removal of Indigenous children in Canada. The audience, comprised of forced adoptees, indigenous elders, and indigenous adoptee organizations personnel, was there to listen to the ongoing results of our research on the Sixties Scoop, specifically how forced adoption of 20,000 children was accomplished and how, through advertising and different governmental programs, became acceptable among the broader Canadian settler population. In the course of the presentation, we showed a number of pictures of Indigenous children featured in ‘The Today’s Child’, a prominent child adoption advertisement that ran as a daily feature in The Telegram and The Toronto’s Star from 1964 to 1982. After the presentation, we invited questions and comments from the knowledge users and indigenous elders. What we received in response was nothing short of a castigation of the use of the images in our presentation and the images themselves. Comments included: ‘Showing these images revictictimizes the children that are now adults’ and ‘These ads are like puppy adoption advertisements’.

In the end, project members and I have, at the urging of our project Elders, chosen to not include pictures of Indigenous children in future publications and presentations. Without consultation with the children that are now adults (or no longer alive) and the fact that these children were never asked if they wanted to be part of this broader adoption campaign, we were confronted by the violence of reproducing these images through publications and presentations because of this association with biopolitical violence of the Sixties Scoop (Spencer and Sinclair, 2017). It is precisely this political landscape that children’s faces, be it images in popular media or produced by researchers in qualitative research, are inserted. The limiting of scope to ethical considerations in research on children holds the potential that such scholars overlook the immanently political aspects of all images, including those of children.

Prompted by this experience, in this article, I take on the problem of the face in visual images of children (see Nutbrown, 2011; Phelan and Kinsella, 2012). This is a problem that is engendered through the act of deploying the visualizing techniques and visual representations (images specifically) of children in publications. The problem is fundamentally related to images of children that, due to their age, awareness tied to life experience, and their ‘innocence’ (Stockton, 2009), putatively cannot provide informed consent to be both pictured and have their pictures presented to a wider public.

While this problem is one that may be tied to visualization in general (most extensively discussed by Barthes (1981) and Sontag (1977)), it nevertheless is a problem, I argue, that has been couched in singularly within a question of ethics in qualitative research and academic disciplines like child studies, criminology, and sociology. Here, I utilize the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to scrutinize the tendency in qualitative research and child studies to reduce the problem of the face as a matter of ethics and to automatically pixilate the children’s faces in academic publications. These philosophers are presented because they offer sustained reflections on the face in their collaborations; in addition, these philosophers’ reflections on the face, ethics, and politics have moved into social scientific communications regarding images and the face (Bignall, 2012; Celis Bueno, 2020; Raffel, 2002). At the same time, these philosopher’s reflections on the face cannot be reconciled with existing discussions of ethics and the child’s face, as they complicate and extend understandings of the problem of the face. That is, whereas the conventional literature on visual methods sees the face as the foundation of ethics, Deleuze and Guattari view the face as a landscape that is arranged within a broader cultural and political arena. Herein, I use their reflections on the face to move toward couching the problem of the face of the child as a matter for politics. To trouble and reconceptualize the problem of visual images of children, I assert that this problem is intimately connected to the cultural politics of childhood. With this argument in mind, I analyze the aforementioned child advertisements and Roman Vishniac’s (Vishniac, 1999) Children of a Vanished World. They are what Bent Flyvbjerg (2001) calls a paradigmatic case, insofar as these illustrate visual images of children as landscapes that have broader (bio)political implications. These cases also, most importantly, illustrate the problems of engagement with visual images in social scientific research on children.

This article is structured into four main sections. First, I review the existing discussion of visual representations and methodologies as a way of situating research on children and the use of visual images on children in social science research. I then engage with ethics and the pixilation of the child to illustrate the way in which images of children are enframed, with the latter being a means of overcoming the problem of children’s faces in qualitative research. In the second section, I engage with the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their political approach to the problem of the face and how it challenges the primacy of ethics to this problem. I then engage with two cases to illustrate how images of children are far more intimately connected to the cultural politics of childhood than to ethics. In the final section, I discuss, through the concept of the face provided by Deleuze and Guattari, a means of approaching the problem of the pixilation of the face of the child in qualitative research and a critique of the dominant cultural politics of childhood.

Visual Methods, Ethics, and the Pixilation of the Child

In this section, I first engage with qualitative methods, visual methods, and ethics more broadly to give the broader context that sets the stage for claims regarding ethics and visual representations of children. I then turn my attention to discussions of ethics and debates regarding the pixilation of the face in visual representations of children in qualitative research (Nutbrown, 2011; Phelan and Kinsella, 2012). In regard to these interconnected literatures, I outline how the face is habitually connected to ethics and qualitative research.

Visual methods and the availability of manifold forms of digital media are viewed as both increasing the sources of data and enhancing representation and posing a number of potential problems in terms of semiotic and ethical challenges to qualitative researchers (Dicks et al., 2006; Knoblauch and Schnettler, 2012). In relation to the former, visual methods and reliance on various forms of digital media are motivated by the desire to secure more ‘valid’ and ‘authentic’ data about the people and situations in studies and by the realization that conventional forms of research often constrain the data in ways that misrepresent the phenomenon the research(er) wishes to understand (Liebenberg, 2009; Mannay, 2010). Photos, photo-diaries, and videos are viewed as aiding in generating participants’ critical reflection of an otherwise taken-for-granted lived reality. The visual aspects also provide a basis for thick description and interpretation of images (Allen, 2011, 2012; Dowdall and Golden, 1989). Indeed, the use of images and videos add to the possibilities of exploring the sensual experiences within manifold contexts, including aspects of spatiality and temporality (Orr and Phoenix, 2015; Pink, 2008; Powell, 2010; Sheridan et al., 2011). Visual methods are also viewed as having the potential of building the research participant’s reflexivity into data collection and analysis and their views on the visual-specific subject matter which can establish a position from which the participant’s perspective is produced (Chawla-Duggan et al., 2018; Mason, 2005). In terms of public scholarship, ethnographers have utilized ethnographically produced film and images as ideal media to convey qualitative materials to the general public and a means of inserting research into conversations about relevant issues (Franzen, 2013; Hraba et al., 1980).

Concomitantly, there are many uses of visual methods with varying levels of connection and guidance by the visual methods and ethics literature (Merchant, 2011; Pink, 2004, 2008; Rose, 2011). The literature generally proposes that complete anonymization of published, even participant produced, visual images is impossible and will always be subject to ethical deliberation (Allen, 2012; Wiles et al., 2008). This is complicated by the problem of representation in visual methods (Galman, 2009), specifically the power imbalances implicit in representing and being represented. In an attempt to overcome this problem, scholars have engaged in collaborative, cooperative, and participant produced forms of inquiry (Godden, 2017; Guell and Ogilvie, 2015). In addition, researchers have addressed this problem through alternative, art-based approaches, combining research, art, and pedagogy (Hartel et al., 2018), and the (re)presentation of visual data as cultural practices of research and remembering (Hurdley, 2007, 2010; La Jevic and Springgay, 2008). Visual methods are considered as oriented toward an ethics of being-with, which is entrenched in gestures of nonviolence (La Jevic and Springgay, 2008). This is to say that the field of visual methods is committed to an ethical position, one that is committed to pursuing a relationship with research subjects that is not, at its most base level, harmful. This is predicated on a dyadic relationship between the researcher and participants, one that is based on an ethical commitment by the former to the latter that is often mediated by institutional controls of research ethics boards and based on the relative marginality of the participant. Concomitantly, such ethical commitments to adult participants are, ineluctably, mediated by legal mandates of Institutional ethics boards and university copyright laws, where permissions to reproduce images are affirmed based on the circumstances of the adult in an image.

One of the most acute ethical mediations based on marginality is in relation to qualitative research involving images of children. The remainder of this section limits discussion to works that formally connect with and are named under the umbrella of visual methods, children, and ethics. A central premise of discussions of ethics in research on children is, while recognizing that it is never completely possible to protect all young children, it is imperative that no research should knowingly put children at risk, regardless of the perceived salience of the research (Nutbrown, 2011; Phelan and Kinsella, 2012). As such, researchers who conduct research with children should ostensibly remain vigilant in their inquiry regarding their duty to care for their young participants. Phelan and Kinsella (2012) evince five areas of ethical concern including assent or willingness to participate, informed consent and assent using visual methods, issues of disclosure, power imbalances, and representations of the child. While some of these areas of ethical concern are self-explanatory, these authors urge scholars to enact reflexivity in the ethical moments that occur in the course of research with children. They sum up this by proposing a ‘call for greater attention to reflexivity in qualitative research lies at the heart of living ethical practice in qualitative research and that the ideals of enabling child safety, dignity, and voice serve as useful guides in the quest for ethical practices in research with children’ (Phelan and Kinsella, 2012: 89).

At the same time, Cathy Nutbrown (2011: 8 italics in original) puts forth the concern that ‘in line with ethical guidance on the protection of researchers and their participants, some ethical reviewers are so concerned to protect children’s identities that despite assurances of permissions from parents and children and despite careful checking of images to be used in reports, they (and some members of conference audiences) suggest that images should be distorted beyond recognition’. A child’s face must be pixelated beyond recognition in publications. Concomitantly, the ethical relationship is founded on the face of the child to be exposed or not exposed. ‘The’ child remains decontextualized from the political and cultural context. What is clear is that there are two issues at play. First, the ‘universal child’ in these discussions, due to a manifold of reasons discussed below, lacks the maturity and knowledge to make decisions regarding whether to publish their faces unpixellated. Second, the child’s face is a stand in for who they are; their being. They are the other, and their face is the foundation of ethics. Such a focus on the face and ethics is not without precedence.

Consider the 20^th-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who points to the salience of the face as we engage with the other. He denotes three characteristics of the face: (1) the directness of exposure of another, (2) the other’s way of being, and a (3) incitement that calls out to me (Levinas, 1999: 163). The exposure to the other’s face, in this way, is entirely a concrete, embodied experience. In Levinas’ frame, the encounter with the face lacks any mediation by culture, politics, reason, or language. The face is an immediate experience that reveals the other in its full nudity. He explains that the ‘nakedness of the face is not what is presented to me because I disclose it, what would therefore be presented to me, to my powers, to my eyes, to my perceptions, in a light exterior to it. The face has turned to me—and this is its very nudity. It is by itself and not by reference to a system’ (Levinas, 1969: 74–75). This alterity of the other, for Levinas, provokes an ethical relation. The other’s face entails not hostility but hospitality. In other words, the other’s face welcomes the individual and invites a welcoming response. Levinas builds on this claim by stating that it is not simply that the face welcomes the individual, but rather, the individual experiences the other’s face as an infinite sense of responsibility for the other.

It is in this responsibility that we can understand the ethical relationship to the face of the child. What is particularly evident is the homology between the way in which Levinas establishes the fundamental relationship to the other and the way in which ethics have figured in the literature on ethics in qualitative methods, and specifically in relation to the ethics of the child’s unpixellated face. What is particularly instructive is the framing of alterity and the dyadic relationship to the other that this implies. Abstracted from culture and politics, the face is naked in the sense that all that is left is the ethical relationship, one characterized by a responsibility to the other.

In a more definitive way, this orientation of the other has manifested in relation to approaches to research on children. First, children are the other insofar as their immaturity figures as a biological fact of life and concomitantly such approaches to children are cleansed from the fact that immaturity is understood and made meaningful through culture (James and Prout, 1997). As Kathryn Stockton (2009: 4) has put it, it is a ‘matter of children’s delay: the supposed gradual growth, their suggested slow unfolding which, unhelpfully, has been relentlessly figured as vertical movement upward (hence, ‘growing up’) toward full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness’. Children are the tabula rasa qua other that are represented through their potential as future adults, and as such, they are shaped and constructed through discourses of children’s ‘best interests’ (Spencer and Sinclair, 2017; Corssaro, 1997; Moss and Petrie, 2002). Indeed, the lived experiences of certain groups of children tend to be excluded when applying a developmental conception of childhood (such as the indigenous child, the adopted child, etc.) because factors such as culture and context are not considered. The issue with these conceptualizations is that they do not account for the sociocultural elements of childhood or do they provide spaces for children to participate in social and political spheres of their everyday lives.

This orientation to the other is the ethical foundation under which the determination to pixilate the child’s face is made. Turned towards the researcher’s relationship to the child and their face (be it living or deceased child’s face), this helps to explain how concerns, fundamental to this relationship, are ethical in orientation without considerations of the broader cultural politics of engagement with the child. It thereby removes such ontological considerations that are all too often enframed by existential matters intersected by politics and language. The child’s face in the ethical framing, then, must be a surface that can only be made sense of by the adult researcher through ethical terms. When scholars couch matters of the child’s face in ethical terms, they delimit making sense of the ontological basis of the face and simplify the complexities of faces and children and visual researcher’s relationships to them. Such framing the problem of the face singularly in ethical terms represents an oversimplified relationship between the researcher and image-child and the audience consuming such images and the broader political basis under which such images are produced and signified. We need to therefore examine the conditions under which the (re)presentations of the face of the child occur. In the remainder of this article, utilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I foreground the ontology of the face and considerations of identity and identity formation in analyzing the child’s face and the politics of such a spectacle.

Deleuze and Guattari, Faciality and Politics

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, respectively, were collaborators for over 25 years, and their joint work can be seen as a response to the Marxist and Freudian dogmas of their time (Dosse, 2011). Their work is characterized by a proliferation of concepts. One such concept is that of the face. In the chapter ‘Year Zero: Faciality’ in A Thousand Plateaus, they respond specifically to Levinas and elucidate the ways in which identities are produced, and they contend that concrete ‘faces’ should not be assumed to come readymade. Instead, ‘faces’ are created by an abstract machine of faciality, a social organizing machine of sorts, ‘which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 168). Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the face is, specifically, in opposition to the reflex conjoining of the face and ethics. Instead, for Deleuze and Guattari, the face is a production of signifying regimes intertwined together.

The face is generally viewed and comprehended as the signifying surface of a body’s subjectivity. Concomitantly, Deleuze and Guattari refute the common argument that the humanity of a subject is found in the face. To make sense of this, the face is fundamentally a white wall/black hole system. The white wall pertains to the face as a signifier. This white wall of significance is a surface that produces signifiers, in the form of such dichotomies as man-woman and/or black-white. Signification is the meaning of those facial traits divergent from the dominant level zero of humanity: the white male, heterosexual, upper-class majoritarian face.

The black hole of subjectivity is an absorption of those signifiers by the subject. This is the inscription of those dichotomies and the hierarchies associated with such traits. Deleuze and Guattari articulate the white wall and black hole system in terms of two functions: selecting facial units - from a wall of signifiers - and making choices from the black hole of subjectivity. Faces are produced as they are indexes of power that are worshipped and reproduced. For example, on coins, in paintings, or religious artifacts. In this way, the face is not somehow ethically neutral; it as a matter of being a face implies a politics of signification and subjectification. It produces a surface and a way of thinking. The theme of images allows Deleuze and Guattari to transcend the problem of objectivity versus subjectivity towards something that is either active or passive: passive when the black hole of the eyes is affected by light and active when it reflects light of the white wall qua face. This combination forms a mask, which is literally the image-affection. For example, a close-up of a Trump face, which becomes a quality and intensity. The abstract machine of faciality is created at the boundary separating the two.

It is not an other’s difference that is engendered in the face but the recognition of an other’s potential or failure to resemble the dominant (MacCormack, 2004). As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 168) state, ‘faces are not basically individual: they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralises in advance any expressions or connections unnameable to the appropriate significations’. Faces urge us to tally and evaluate the frequency and character of certain face types to reflect a particular culture as epistemically enclosed. Faces become the point of comparison to a majoritarian face as a process of making faces intelligible. When a given image of face differs or deviates from the majoritarian face in terms of gender, race, or any other marker, they fail and are marked by defect. For example, the faces of children in African aid recipients in charity advertisements are evaluated as deviations from the civilized, Western white settler. They are pitied as such.

The face is also a landscape. It is changeable only in relation to a set of predictable variances and is cultivated by a specific set of people, who own, run and map the land. Such a landscape is made to be intelligible only in a certain sense. The notion of the face as a landscape implies that the face is an assemblage that involves arrangement. Faces reflect a landscape both in their positioning and posture, but also how they are arranged in relation to a set of all-encompassing social circumstances (MacCormack, 2004: 137). For example, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 178) state that ‘racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity. . . From the point of view of racism, there is no exterior, and there are no people on the outside. There are only people who are not like us and whose crime it is not to be’. ¹ Here, Deleuze and Guattari are directly critiquing the sorts of ethics of the face that follows the common or Levinasian logic discussed above. From the point of view of the majoritarian onlooker, the other’s face, in some cases, does not exist; they are nonhuman. Repression happens when plural calls for cultural recognition are challenged by the white wall of signification, which reacts only by bouncing back assumed structures of meaning and is not capable of recognizing creative inventions of differences that depart from the majoritarian perspective (Bignall, 2012). Couched singularly in ethical terms, such analysis of the problem of the child obscures the face of the racialized (nonwhite) other because the ethical relationship is always already short-circuited. In fact, it is precisely because of the cultural politics of childhood that the (racialized) child’s face is subject to the adult gaze in the first instance.

The face, then, involves cultural politics, and the question becomes what circumstances trigger the machine that produces the face and facialization (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 170, 181). Faces have a particular relation to assemblages of power that require social production. Such politics are associated with molarization, where molar describes structure and principles that are based on the rigid molar stratifications and State defined codings related to class, gender, and race. Faces always convey a message. Faces become, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, a veritable megaphone (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 179). As will be shown below, the faces of children can be both accompanied by text and not, but nevertheless express a message. Utilizing the reflections on the face provided by Deleuze and Guattari, I now engage with two cases that illustrate the problem of the face in the visual research on children.

Case I: Selling Transracial Adoption and The Today’s Child

On 6 June 1964, child adoption advertisements began in The Toronto Telegram and continued weekly, written by reporter Helen Allen, known as ‘the fairy godmother of adoption’ and as a ‘catalyst that brought together families and children’ in Canada (Srikanthan, 2006). The Today’s Child, as the column was referred to, served as a stage to showcase children seeking adoptive parents (Strong-Boag, 2005) of various ethnicities and races, abilities, ages, and genders. By 1974, Today’s Child was running in 23 daily newspapers, 150 weekly newspapers, and ‘racial and ethnic presses’ (see Bendo et al., 2019). In the first-ever excerpt from Today’s Child, 6 June 1964, Allen describes ‘hard to adopt’ children in the following way:

No newborn infants will be included. For them new parents are found easily. The others are children more difficult to secure homes for – though when you see their pictures you will wonder why. Often the problem is color. One of the group, an adorable youngster, has already been rejected by a prospective home because of a ‘too dark’ skin. Some have not been able to find families of their own because people have hesitated to undertake the responsibility of an older child. . . Both adoptive parents and social agencies used to think only beautiful healthy infants could even be considered. Now older children are being adopted. Mentally retarded children are never offered for adoption, but all sorts of physical handicaps have been accepted by adoptive parents – epilepsy, heart trouble, cleft palate, cerebral palsy, blindness, deadness, club feet. . . Race is a greater handicap to adoption than physical disability. Greatest difficulty is found in obtaining adoptive homes for Negro children, with Indians and youngsters of mixed race next. . .The people who have to wait long periods for a child are the ones with rigid specifications about what they want usually a pre-school little girl of Anglo, Saxon background, bright and with good potential.

The 4300 children, whose photos and descriptions appeared in the Today’s Child, were ranked according to a social hierarchy of the most desirable, and therefore, adoptable children (Bendo et al., 2019). The majoritarian face of the Today’s Child was abled-bodied, bright, healthy females under the age of two years of Anglo-Saxon descent. Those lower on the hierarchy and those portrayed as less desirable were considered ‘hard to adopt’. The faces of the children featured in the Today’s Child are brought into sensible comprehension through majoritarian substantive expression. They are ‘hard to adopt’ by virtue of this expression. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 178) state: ‘racism never detects the particles of the other. . . it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out. . . . Its cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence and naiveté’. The orientation of The Today’s Child proceeded according to a regime of seemingly charitable intentions, but in the visual image and text in the advertisement, proceeds according to a logic of white wall/black hole system of racism. The white wall of the child’s face signifies the degrees of sameness to the majoritarian most valued child. On the other hand, the text describing the children aligns the visual image with modes of subjectification. We cannot approach the faces of the children in Today’s Child from an ethical standpoint because such images are always already subject to the white wall/black hole of subjectivity. They are products of cultural-political arrangements that determine the landscape and the basis by which I make sense of a child’s image before me.

The question, then, is: what is the broader cultural politics of the child in relation to the Today’s Child? As evidenced in the narrative at beginning of this article, when the adoptees that are now adults viewed the pictures of Indigenous children up on the screen, they interpret the images through the prism of survivors of the Sixties Scoop, a governmental technique of settler colonialism (see Spencer, 2017). Whereas the images and words arrange the landscape of the Today’s Child in particular ways that make the child appealing to prospective adoptive parents, the images bleed beyond the pages of the newspaper. This process in question is seeing. A seeing of oneself as others see one (Massumi, 2002). This process of seeing, like those in attendance at the previously discussed knowledge user meeting, resonates beyond image to the now aged bodies of forced adoptees who fold in their particular subjectivities to the landscape of the images. Concomitantly, the images have a quasi-corporeality involving affect, as they both have the ability to affect the onlooker and a susceptibility to be affected. These are two key modes that images of children are intimately political. While such images would be overlooked by university research ethics review boards because they are in the public domain, they are from a (bio)political perspective violent and obscene. Furthermore, in the snapshot assessment of university research ethics review boards and contemporaneous ethical reflections made in relation to images of children produced by qualitative researchers, such political dimensions are altogether unacknowledged and/or beyond the scope of consideration. Paying heed to the cultural politics of the child in relation to images of children opens the researcher up to not only the complexity of images of children but how the politics of the image bear heavy on the decision to reveal the image of a child or not in publications and other forums of representation.

Case II: The Holocaust and Children of a Vanished World

On Sunday, 25 November 2018, while making my way through the Vilna Gaon Holocaust museum (aka ‘The Green House’) in Vilnius, Lithuania, I came across a large photo of a beautiful child with the description ‘VVG2M’. The image is from Roman Vishniac’s (1999) Children of a Vanished World, a book that catalogs, with very little commentary, the lives of children before their world vanished to the Shoah. ² What gripped me about this image is that the child looks eerily similar to my children, third-generation Holocaust survivors, and the fact that the sex of the child is not evident. It is a face slightly obfuscated by the child’s hand that are up near their chin, with a shadow cast across the right side of the face. The child’s face is dirty; its hair is disheveled.

Roman Vishniac’s text is particularly controversial as the 16,000 photographs he took of Jews in small towns across Eastern Europe were done in secret and under perilous conditions prior to the Holocaust. Children of a Vanished World became controversial not only for his efforts to memorialize the Yiddish culture of these towns but also for his focus on capturing children’s images, children who did not always know they were having their pictures taken and were certainly not aware that their images would live on in a text singularly featuring their images (Johnson, 2013). Vishniac’s work is particularly illustrative because it critically illustrates the politics of publishing children’s images. In Vishniac’s (1999: 449) text, the caption states ‘Child of Jewish Poverty: Trnava, Slovakia’. The placement of the child’s face both within the museum and Vishniac’s book operates to form the white wall that is the surface indicating a context under which the Holocaust took place. The face becomes overcoded by poverty and constitutes the Jewish Slovak community. As noted by Newhouse (2010: 2) of the faces of the children in this image and others in the text, ‘the chosen images were, in the main, those that advanced an impression of the Shtetl ³ as populated largely by poor, pious, embattled Jews— an impression aided by cropping and fabulist captioning done by his own hand. Vishniac’s curating job was so comprehensive that it would not only limit the appreciation of his talents but also skew the popular conception of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe’. As with most of the images in Vishniac’s text, this image projects a lack of diversity of subjects in his work from Eastern Europe and the quality of composition (Newhouse, 2010).

As a landscape, the white wall reflects off the child’s face projecting the poverty of Jews in ghettos during the holocaust. The image, and others in Vishniac’s collection, is arranged in such a way that the face is abject, signifying vulnerability to the onlooker as a witness to a child that will, ineluctably, erased from the earth. At the same time, these images are biopolitical, as insofar as they are subjects to Nazi extermination; they are bare life (Agamben, 1998, 1999). The mass death of children haunts the innocuous nature of the child’s image. The fear and pain of the child forms the black hole of subjectivity that, in turn, is intelligible through that prism.

From an ethical standpoint, Vishniac’s intervention can only be understood from a standpoint of his relationship with the children he took pictures of. The presentation of the images can only be understood in diametric terms: to present or not to present. As demonstrated here, the (bio)politics of the child’s image is central to understanding the landscapes of the images. The images are arranged in specific ways not only to mark loss but also to accentuate the dire conditions in which the children are situated and also to foreclose other ways of knowing Jewish children in pre-Holocaust Europe. Such fabulist captioning is mythic in orientation insofar as make claims to people at a molar level. Concomitantly, the images, as shown here, are open to deconstruction in the broad sense and the function of such fabulation is mutually antinomic (cf. Mengue, 2008).

Discussion and Conclusion: Probehead, the Face, and Micropolitics

While the problems associated with and the challenge of overcoming such appalling representations, Deleuze and Guattari offer a solution through what they call probeheads, as a way of breaking down the majoritarian face. Such a probehead requires thinking difference to subvert the majoritarian face, to represent it as a temporal, transitory face as only one of many facial forms. Dismantling the face requires a careful analysis of the signifying discourses and representations that make up the subject’s social and political context, in addition to taking a critical and reflexive understanding regarding how faces shape identity (Bignall, 2012). Regardless of whether a given qualitative researcher produces their own images of children through visualizing techniques or extracts pictures from preexisting sources, when approaching the problem of the face of the child they should be committed to such political maneuvers rather than ethical concerns associated with the majoritarian, generic child. This is also to say that there is no generic child that we have a standard ethical relationship to. This can mean, in some political situations, that the work of breaking down the white wall actually demands that we see the child’s face without pixilation. The cultural politics of the face of the child requires attention to the (political) landscape of the face of the child before deciding to include it in products of social science visual research. Justice for those children represented in the above cases demands a dismantling of signifying discourses and the political context under which these pictures appear. We must also expose how these representations contribute to dominant (majoritarian) understandings of the identities of children of all backgrounds that marginalize other faces and ways of becoming child.

Challenging and/or deciding when to present the face of a given child is not a matter of engaging with politics at the molar level but of micropolitics. While the former is overcoded by the identity politics, the micropolitical facilitates ‘a firstness, a kind of power or chance, a freshness of what has not yet been made definite by habit or law’ (Rajchman, 2000:55). This can mean a breaking from the now habitual, taken for granted pixilation of the child’s face in visual representations in qualitative research. From a temporal standpoint, the task, then, is not to annul the event in which a face was arranged, but rather to see it as a pragmatic site for intervention (Guattari, 2008: 8). The intervention’s outcome is entangled with the researcher’s quality of engagement, as demonstrated in the two cases presented here. Following Guattari (2008: 150), this involves not only backward-looking interpretations of the symptoms of preexisting structures that led to the production of such images (settler colonialism, the Holocaust, etc.) but also a forward-looking, pragmatic application of ‘singularities toward the construction of new universes of reference for subjectification’. This is to say that the micropolitical is a nonstupid, nonautomatic, and nonhabitual response to images (Rajchman, 2000). The decision for qualitative researchers to include an image of a child in a publication is carried out in opposition to the knee jerk, ‘one size fits all’ tendency to pixilating children’s faces. Instead, determinations to pixelate or not should be made in the cultural and political context such images are (and were) produced (be it by the researcher or extracted from a preexisting source) and with the commitment to novel interpretations of how the images are arranged.

To conclude, I have argued that the problem of visual representations of faces of children is intimately connected to the cultural politics of childhood. The matter of ethics in relation to children’s pixelated images is hampered by its inability to recognize how alterity is preconditioned by an ontology of difference. Such a repositioning of the problem of the face in ontological terms allows for the analysis of images of children in relation to politics. Utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to the face allows for an understanding of representations of children’s face as a landscape that is assembled in particular ways that signify deviations from the majoritarian child and impute subjectivities. If we couch our analysis in the cultural politics of the child and Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis, we can push back against the doxa regarding the pixilation of the child’s image and empower researchers and children to make decisions regarding whether to pixilate children’s images. Future visual research and university research ethics review boards should consider the politics of the child’s face as a starting point in the decision to include the unpixelated images of children in publications.