involved, the pictures Ewald’s children produce show us authentic perspectives that portray childhoods which are rooted in the complex environments they inhabit. The children do not show themselves as Romantic, Innocent or Knowing but rather as individuals existing in worlds where the worlds of the child and the adult interact and overlap. Ewald breaks down the boundaries between adult and child to reveal childhood as part of a process where all adults were once children and all children ( if death, a common theme in Ewald’s work, does not interrupt) will become adults. Children are, as in the pre-romantic era, mini-adults, but adults are also maxi-children.
Where does Emily of The Rose Garden stand in relation to these conflicting views of childhood? The construction of Loretta Lux does bring in the child’s perspective of childhood, but it is very different to that allowed by Ewald, Dodgson or Mann. At the same time, however, it also shares some common themes. Where Ewald frames her children’s pictures through ideas (the idea of the unconscious, the religious and the dreamworld) that she accentuates through her workshops, Lux visually creates that framework through her digital imposition of psychologically loaded landscapes onto her pictures. Ewald gives her children the freedom to choose their landscape,