Kathy Vargas

I began this series as a meditation about how family love defines our lives, but it’s also a meditation on how photography can fail us. The idea began while I was watching the evening news one Christmas Day. The photo of a beautiful little boy with the hugest smile flashed on the screen. He’d died that day, locked in a closet, starved to death by his family. I wondered why that child had smiled in the photo and realized that photography sometimes reveals very little.
A few months later there was another story about a mother who’d killed her two babies, stuffed them into garbage bags and thrown them under the house. When they were discovered, their grandmother blamed Child Protective Services, to whom she’d shown pictures of the children, their arms and legs covered in bruises. But no one saw those hurts, so her accusations were dismissed. Are we conditioned to see only happiness in images of childhood?
I re-photographed random childhood photos simply to ask, “Were you happy, healthy, safe in childhood?” The photos told me very little.
I photographed the toys we give children: some are innocent enough, but some teach violence. Do they teach hate as well?
There are rose dresses for the joyous, and there are grass dresses for those taken too soon. These photos became particularly poignant for me when children were recently separated from their families at the border, some even dying while held in captivity.
I photographed children at a playground where I was taken as a child and wondered if their lives were as they seemed, or darker than I could penetrate with a camera. How much do we know from photos of children passed around on cell phones?