29th October 2005

Youthful Ambition

by Catherine Keenan,

Culture, Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald

Ella Dreyfus is used to causing a stir with her photographs. Some of the confronting subjects she's chosen include nude pregnant women, nude old women, a female-to-male transsexual, fat bodies, circumcised penises and the demented. So her latest exhibition, Under Twelves, seems surprising at first - for its tameness. It consists of 14 identically posed black and white shots of the boys on her son's soccer team.

Photographed from the chest up, they are sweetly beautiful, full of a softness and vulnerability that is all the more precious for the sense that it will soon be swept away by puberty. And therein, perhaps, lies the rub.

We are not used to admiring the beauty of young boys, Dreyfus says. Just think back to the hullabaloo surrounding Germaine Greer's book The Boy, in 2003. "We accept totally pictures of young girls; we don't even analyse it any more. But when you deal with the young boy, everyone gets: "Oh, homophobia! pedophilia!" all this fear comes in. and you wonder: "What's going on? Why is there such a taboo about the young boy?"

Breaking taboos is something Dreyfus has done for years, so it's not surprising this made the boys appealing to her as subjects. Another strong thread in her work is uncovering the beauty in traditionally non-beautiful bodies, and when she looked a t photographs of her son, Axel, and his friends, she realised she had found that again, too.

The beauty of little girls is understood. It was, in fact, one of the reasons Dreyfus didn't want to shoot girls of the same age, as she couldn't think of a way to do it that would be different and non-exploitative. Even girls themselves are aware of their beauty at that age. "I don't think the girls would be able to not put on a face, put on a pose, model for me. The boys were not modelling. They were just sitting on a chair. It's quite different."

There are many reasons why the beauty of young boys is so often overlooked, she says. Partly, of course, it is because worries about pedophilia are justified, and the photographers Sally Mann, Betsy Schneider and Tierney Gearon, among others, have all been criticised for exhibiting nude or semi-nude photographs of their young children. The galleries that show work have been subject to vicious campaigns and police threats and even been shut down.

"I know a woman who was at art school in Western Australia, a mother", Dreyfus says. "She had photographs of her kids taken nude in the backyard. Someone saw them, called in the cops, there was a court case. Finally, she got off, because finally it was understood they were in the context of art, not child pornography."

Dreyfus certainly didn't want this to happen to her. So she photographed the boys from the chest up. "I don't want to in any way invade of step over that line that could be seen by them, by me, by viewers, by parents - as exploiting or sexualising them."

Naturally, she also got permission from the boys' parents, some of whom sat in on the photo shoots. She will be surprised if anyone reads anything untoward into the photographs she ahs taken. "But, of course, it's a very fine line between sexualising someone and sensualising them."

The photos do unquestionably show the sensual beauty of the boys. Like crysalids, they are right on the cusp of momentous changes, with facial hair, acne and protruding jaws just around the corner. Dreyfus captures them when they are just leaving the charmed beauty of childhood and the shots highlight the soft curls of one, the wide eyes of another, the gentle slope of the shoulders in a third. Yet they also show the boys' complete unawareness of their beauty and the way they actively try to deny it for fear of being branded a sissy or, even worse, gay.

It's this tension that she brilliantly captures in a picture of Axel and his 15-year-old cousin, Nadav, not included in this series, which recently won the inaugural Olive Cotton Award for photographic portraiture. The two boys stand together with their shirts off and the bands of their undies poking out over their trouser, gangsta-style. But the undies are Bonds, not Calvin Klein, and the arms crossed defiantly over their chests are belied by the puppy fat cushioning the stomachs beneath.

In private, Dreyfus says, her 12-year-old son still loves to be coddled and treated like a baby boy. "But once he's out and about on the street, he's got to be a little man." It's probably not an admission Axel will thank her for and, like his older sister, Felix, 18, he is reluctant to be photographed by his mum.

"For the last five years, I pull out the camera and he runs," she sighs. As a mother, her ulterior motive with this series was simply to get some good shots of him, though she promised he could send the photos to an acting agency so he might be considered for extras work on Home and Away.

Once more, her private life is entwined with her profession. Just as her work on pregnancy grew out of a miscarriage many years ago, so does this project spring from the strength of her love for her son.

"I've been very shocked in my life at the intense love I've felt for both my children, but because he's the younger one it's been transferred to him, and maybe because he's the boy. I'm a Jewish mother! But all the mothers feel it. I can see it. They just adore them. I now know why men get away with so much shit, why they don't wash the bloody dishes or do anything: because they've got these doting mothers!"

Dreyfus, 45, is starting to branch out from photography. She's not planning to give it up - "I can't help myself, I love it" - but she also wants to express her ideas in other media. After teaching photography at the National Art School for 20 years, she has enrolled as a PhD student at the College of Fine Arts in the department of performance, sculpture and installation.

Her topic is surveillance of the body: what lengths people go to to monitor their bodies, and how they do so. Her first major work is a performance piece called Weight and Sea, and asks people to step onto a platform on a boardwalk at Tamarama, then have their weight displayed on a large digital screen above the kiosk.

"The most exciting part for me is watching the public interact, being there to witness it and engage with them about it." With her new projects, she hopes she can skip the two-dimensional representations and get straight to this interaction.

Weight and see will be a hard piece to sell, of course, but then much of her work is. Although her pregnancy series broke attendance records at stills Gallery, she sold only two works from her series on elderly women. "There's not a lot of call for ageing vaginas on the living room wall."

This series, in contrast, should sell well. "I think it's been very hard for artists to stick with working with beauty. A lot of art became grungy in the last 20 years, a sort of anti-beauty." But not these shots. Besides, the boys' mothers will almost certainly buy them.

October 2005

Beauty and Visual Pleasure

by Jacqueline Millner,

Catalogue Essay

"If we but lift our eyes to the beautiful images of young men that stand all about us, there is a world of complex and civilized pleasure to be had. Delight in the boy can only be sharpened by the pathos and irony of his condition of becomingness. What we see in life is gone before we have had time to appreciate it. It is only in art that the compelling evanescent charm of boyhood can be preserved against the ravages of time." Germaine Greer, The Boy, 2003

Germaine Greer begins her most recent book by stating, 'This is a book about male beauty', proposing that 'part of the purpose of this book is to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure'. As a way of thinking about Ella Dreyfus' photographs of boys on the brink of adolescence - 12-year olds who within months will be initiated into the masculine rites of high school life - I want to explore that relationship between visual pleasure and beauty.

I propose that beauty resides neither in a set of objective, formal properties, nor in the eye of the beholder, but that it is rather a complex interaction of subject and object, produced by a compact between object and beholder. Beauty thus conceived is a kind of communication, an act of discovery with profound implications. The intimacy that results from prolonged, intense attention, and the empathy that can emerge from the aching discovery of fallibility and imperfection as a result of this intimacy, are both aspects that characterise this sense of beauty. Beauty is an exchange in which both beholder and beheld become aligned in value. As Wendy Steiner suggests, 'the experience of beauty involves a challenge to achieve the value or beauty of the Other. This elevation requires effort - interpretation, openness - but once achieved, however fleetingly or vicariously, the result is a pleasure different in kind from normal experience'.

Beauty is not reducible to that which evokes sensual pleasure - it is distinct from lust and desire. Beauty is 'disinterested', that is, the basis of its pleasure is not egocentric but beyond personal need. Beauty's pleasure is in fact more complex: when we experience it, it 'feels as though our cognitive apparatus has a connection with some structure beyond itself which underpins what might on the surface appear unfathomable. It makes us feel a part of something larger than ourselves' (Jennifer McMahon).

The value of 'disinterested pleasure' is that it allows (viewing) subjects to distance themselves from their private interests and purposes, it allows subjects to confront the conditions of their own subjectivity and hence necessarily to acknowledge the subjectivity of an Other. In the moment of intensely focused attention beauty evinces, the beholder experiences an expansiveness beyond the self that brings with it a sense of something shared and universal and a disposition that views with delight the particularities of the world. It is an attitude that has the potential to forge a radically different ethical relationship to otherness, one that greets the Other with wonder rather than fear.

When I look at Dreyfus' images, I am overcome by wonder and tenderness at the beauty of male youth. The bright trusting eyes, softly rounded shoulders, perfect skin - all testament to the boy's vitality and limitless potential. An expansiveness of thinking pervades me, and the whole world appears more beautiful by dint of this aesthetic experience. The intensity of this feeling is no doubt in part related to my being a mother of boys themselves undergoing this process of 'becoming' - the role of the mother is an important register in this work, given that Dreyfus' project sprang from her own wonder at the beauty of her son as he began his transformation from child to adolescent. But the maternal is not the only key to these images - their beauty transcends filial relationships.

The experience of beauty's expansiveness allows us as beholders to grant the boy a full spectrum of being, one that affirms those qualities conventionally denied to masculinity such as tentativeness, tenderness, suppleness and softness. Rather than judge the boy according to stereotypical demands of culture - that for instance characterise the boy as 'a problem' that must be tamed and contained, or that equate sensuous portrayals of the boy with illicit desire - the compact of beauty makes possible a radically different sensibility. Beauty allows us to approach the burgeoning masculine subject not with dread and fear, but with wonder and love.

The art critic Vicki Goldberg once noted in response to an exhibition of photography of the male body that there is neither reverence nor fondness for, nor even much public acceptance of, such representations. However, she suggested that 'women's frank appreciation might be rearranging matters; it would be splendid if ironic if women were the ones to restore men's sense of the beauty and dignity of their bodies'. Dreyfus' images could well be situated within this broader project. Her sensitive and intense rendering of these ordinary - yet extraordinary - 12 year olds does indeed affirm the dignity and beauty of the male body in the condition of becomingness.

Panic and Paranoia: The Law and photography in Australia

by Martyn Jolly and Katherine Giles,

Photofile Volume 80 Winter 2007

Extract, page 24:

Police and security are not the only ones taking it upon themselves to constrain photographers, irrespective of any law; concerned parents are also getting jittery. In preparing for her exhibiton of portraits of her son's soccer team, Under Twelves, at the Ground Floor Gallery in Balmain in late 2005, Ella Dreyfus was scrupulous in making sure all parents knew what she was doing. She showed them a sample of the stlye of her shots, and all agreed to her project enthusiastically. "Young boys are beautiful; their mothers know this, but does society allow us to acknowledge their beauty?" asked Dreyfus. But a few days before the show some parents apparently got nervous at the prospect of her portraits inadvertently inciting paedophilia: Dreyfus suddenly found herself requested to withdraw two images from the exhibition and mark six not for sale.