It looks like an ordinary suburban scene that will be replayed across the country this season. A young woman sits in front of a Christmas tree. It’s lopsided and boasts the usual kitsch finery of the season.
Though the tree and domestic setting evoke a family scene, she is alone and you sense that while the signifiers of domestic stability pervade they have been corrupted or mask the abnormality beneath this conventional veneer.
You can’t see the girl’s face; she is wearing a tinsel wig, which obscures her features. She doesn’t want to be seen but this anonymity also captures a moment of pseudo privacy; she is alone with her thoughts.
Because of the exhibition’s theme – sexual abuse of children – we suspect her thoughts are burdened by an ugly secret that cannot be transcended. Even revealing it does not erase its weight.
Privacy and secrecy are the underlying themes of this emotive and chilling exhibition. The title Pinky Promises is a term children use to refer to a secret bond. This childhood practice has been corrupted by abusers to encourage and maintain the silence around sexual abuse. The title also evokes the manner in which adult abusers, and adults who turn a blind eye to abuse, have reneged on their promise to protect those in their care.
A Christmas card written by an abused child to her father in which she declares her hatred for him because he believes her to be a “lirer” (liar) reveals the sense of betrayal victims of this kind of abuse experience.
In these contexts privacy becomes a pathological condition rather than a space where individualism flourishes.
Putting on an exhibition that presents actual abuse cases, exposing victims and perpetrators, challenges the secrecy that has surrounded these acts. Photography seems ideal for this project, given it is thought to reveal the bare truth - there is no room for distortion.
However, some level of secrecy remains intact: most of the victims and perpetrators are anonymous and are referred to via pseudonyms, emphasising a voluntary silence – a sense of shame persists.
This level of anonymity has an unexpected but powerful impact. Aside from Croquet’s black and white photographs there are other photographs; family snapshots in which the faces of the subjects have been blurred to conceal their identity.
In this way the images of victims and people who are part of these narratives become detached from the specifics and come to operate as general symbols. Those family snapshots could be anyone’s. The letters, journal entries and other “evidence” pertaining to each case are eerily familiar, though the contents might be foreign - a subversion of the norm.
This, coupled with Croquet’s understated portrayals of the victims in the present, ensures that instead of viewers becoming swept up by pathos, they are forced to confront the phenomenon itself.
This quality is rare for this kind of exhibition – an exhibition centred on a specific social problem. Usually images of the victims in which their victimhood is emphasised take centre stage.
In such cases they are unwittingly revictimised by our pervasive gaze as we study them. Because the victims in Croquet’s photographs – except for Sid (he is the only victim who is willing to reveal his identity) – chose anonymity, their presence in the photographs is understated. They do not engage the viewer; they purposively evade scrutiny. It is a result of their “silence” but it also emphasises how intangible this abuse is – it leaves no visual trace. Even if we see their faces we cannot know what has been done to them.
Croquet therefore redirects our attention to subtle indicators. A photograph of teddy bears on a shelf in one of the victim’s bedroom’s, for example, would, out of the context of this exhibition, appear mundane but the motif of the teddy bear, a source of childlike comfort, which is given to victims as a buttress against the onslaught of betrayal and pain, has poignancy.
Refreshingly, the perpetrators are an integral part of the narrative, and in some ways their stories are more compelling; the victims might be a product of the abusers’ acts but the perpetrators are shaped by society at large.
Certainly, there is this sense in the case of “James”, a self-confessed paedophile, who was sexually abused as a child. Much of his modus operandi is a product of his days in the army.
An extract from his journal reveals he received no affection from his parents. Many viewers will read the inclusion of this kind of material as a way of lessening the responsibility of the perpetrators.
It should, however, rather be seen as a means of deepening our understanding of the phenomenon, which is much more complex than it appears.
In the story of Adam, another perpetrator, it is implied sexual deviance was a manifestation of a physical abnormality from childhood that caused an unbridgeable rift between him and his contemporaries. He replays abnormality in such a way that he becomes the master of it.
Some images of the perpetrators seem clichéd; such as a close-up of “James”, in which Croquet enacts his desire to scrutinise and punish the perpetrator. Croquet exploits chiaroscuro to ensure that James appears “evil” in this shot, but a pedestrian snapshot of him sitting in room flooded by daylight makes him appear like an ordinary retiree. The variety of mediums used in this exhibition work at eroding a one-dimensional reading of this disturbing phenomenon; the angry letters, drawings and journal entries by the victims demonstrate their persistent defiance. They show what photographs can’t relay.
The diversity of the cases presented at this exhibition also evinces the complexity of sexual abuse. So while the exhibition offers a deeper understanding of the problem, it also highlights our inability to get a handle on it.
n Pinky Promises shows at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until the end of January. Croquet has also published the collection of photographs in a book of the same name, which has been published by Fourthwall Books. - Sunday Independent