Kristina Podobed’s intimate, sensual and surreal photographs have been described by PhotoVogue director Alessia Glaviano as “suspended between dream and reality, at once poetic and subtly unsettling.” The Odesa-born artist explores sites of tension, often at the interface between the human body and the natural world. As a self-taught photographer, Podobed developed her visual language as a teenager, experimenting with friends in loosely staged scenarios exploring identity, anxiety and pleasure at the very cusp of womanhood. Toying at the edges of her otherwise placid images is an almost imperceptible thrum of sexuality and danger.
Podobed has been photographing her son since he was born eight years ago. Whilst these images are largely unstaged, the close attention of Podobed’s camera, ever present, fleetingly interrupts the performance and theatricality of these early years of life. We see moments of play, contemplation, boredom and frustration, and an ambivalence towards the camera that manifests in certain images as a distracted, avoidant gaze, and in others as an intense, almost conspiratorial scrutiny. The photographs reveal the sensuous potential in the domestic, but also the tensions inherent in an embodied childhood. Alongside playfulness and tenderness, there is the spectre of danger, of threats to the child’s porcelain skin. The boy strikes matches, the flames dancing wincingly close to his fingertips. He lies in shallow water whilst a toy octopus seems to suck the air from his nose and mouth. He presses his fingers deep into his eye sockets. He returns the camera’s gaze from a hospital bed, plaintive in an oxygen mask.
During her son’s short life, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine forced Podobed and her family to leave the country abruptly, resettling in Paris. “Leaving Ukraine changed the way I think about my own childhood,” she reflects. “When you suddenly lose the place where your memories belong, you start looking at those memories differently. Things that once felt ordinary become much more important.” In the photographs, otherwise typical childhood games with toy guns become freighted with a heavier emotional resonance. The spiders are made of rubber; the gun shoots only water. But both are apt signifiers for the types of threats, both fixed and creeping, that elude parental control.
“Pictures of children are at once the most common, the most sacred, and the most controversial images of our time,” writes Anne Higonnet in her book Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (1998). The concept of a “childhood” is, after all, culturally produced, and it’s interesting to consider the ways that photographic technologies were developing alongside debates around the construction of childhood in the mid to late nineteenth century, especially in terms of identity, consent and desire. Early photographic representations of children enshrined post-Romantic principles around the innate purity and innocence of childhood – the a priori belief that children are born innocent and have to be protected from the corruptions of the adult world. Up until the eighteenth century, attitudes towards children were quite different. Children made up a valuable portion of the workforce during the Industrial Revolution, often working the same 12 hour shifts as adults. Before the cultural and legal shifts in the late eighteenth century, the notion that the child’s natural and essential state was that of innocence was significantly less popular. Instead, a child was assumed to be born into sin, attaining moral purity gradually as they aged. What we can see is that representations of childhood always symbolise the concerns and agendas of the adult world, rather than the realities of life as a child.
Podobed seems content to challenge widely-mandated concepts of childhood innocence, affording her son a greater degree of representational agency and diversity. She does not try to resolve this tension around his corporeal vulnerability; rather she leans into it, examines it, as if it might provide some new understanding of the wider world she has brought him into. The hints of taboo at play recall the work of Sally Mann, whose photographs of her own children, collected in the book Immediate Family (1992), were carefully constructed vignettes challenging that very construction of childhood and childhood agency, and the imaginary boundaries between public and private. Or, in Mann’s words, photographs of her children “going about their lives, sometimes without clothing.”
Media coverage of Immediate Family charged Mann with pornography, irresponsibility and child abuse; thirty years later, when the works were exhibited in a group show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2025, police seized the prints and questioned Mann. The ongoing hostility and horror these works engender in conservative society opens up a debate on the liberatory potential of mother–child relations that present alternative ways of seeing and being. Because Mann made images of her children that deviated from accepted notions of Romantic innocence, the work was considered unnatural, a violation. This says as much about what society deems acceptable for mothers as it does for children.
Some questions around consent are reasonable. I am a stranger to Podobed’s son, but I have closely examined images of his nude and partially nude body. Mann’s children, now adults, have frequently appeared unclothed on gallery walls across the globe as well as in one of the biggest-selling photobooks of all time. Mann addresses this somewhat in her memoir, Hold Still (2015), claiming: “Children cannot be forced to make pictures like these: mine gave them to me. Every picture represents a gesture of such generosity and faith that I, in turn, felt obliged to repay them by making the best, most enduring images that I could.” She describes her children as collaborators, assisting her in setting up the scene, and in the process of editing the final sequence. In the same chapter, however, she recalls making the image The Last Time Emmett Modelled Nude, for which she spent seven straight days shooting her son shivering and naked in the middle of a freezing cold river until she felt she had perfected the shot. I suspect that the dynamics of consent and bodily autonomy within parent-child relationships (or really, any relationships with an imbalance of power) are more complex than perhaps many of us would like to admit. I can’t help but revisit a conversation between the photographer Justine Kurland and her son Casper McCorkle (then aged around 10) published in 2016 in Aperture magazine, in which they discuss Highway Kind (2017), a body of work that includes many photographs of him:
McCorkle: Do most of the people who you photograph want to be photographed?
Kurland: I ask people to let me photograph them, and a lot of the times they say, “No.” But I never photographed anyone who didn’t want to be photographed.
McCorkle: You photographed me when I didn’t want to be photographed.
Kurland: You’re the only person I photographed who didn’t want to be photographed. But when you really didn’t want to be photographed, you just kind of walked away.
McCorkle: Okay.
Kurland: It’s true. The times I photographed you when you didn’t want me to, we would make a deal. And a deal is a deal.
Podobed’s images are not constructed or staged in the same way that Mann’s are, and can be seen more as momentary interruptions to the natural flow of a childhood. But the work makes similar demands of its viewer, asking necessary questions around maternal subjectivity and gratification, and the construction of alternative narratives around what it means to mother and to parent. The distinction between “didn’t want to” and “really didn’t want to” bears reflection. Most parents will recognise all too well the prickly instances of negotiation and bribery lodged within contemporary parenting. The photographs showing Podobed’s son turning away, showing his back to the camera or covering his face, problematise the issue of consensual engagement whilst also symbolising the emotional and dialogic intricacies of parent-child bonds. There’s no real evidence that Podobed’s son is anything but a willing and enthusiastic subject in this beguiling body of work. However, we should consider the “deals” women make (especially women artists), and the collateral involved, in simply telling our own stories. If a photograph of a child is always a photograph of the ideals and values of an adult, then Podobed shows us that being a mother is not a fixed thing, no more “natural” than the innocence of a child. To paraphrase Higonnet, these photographs estrange us from the received image of childhood but also of motherhood, presenting a set of alternative possibilities for engaging, experiencing and picturing young life.
