MCLC: sewer pipe baby

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: sewer pipe baby
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Source: The Guardian (5/29/13):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/photography-blog/2013/may/29/china-
baby-59-rescue-ultimate-abandonment

China's Baby 59 sewer pipe rescue is a grotesque image of abandonment
The harshness of human existence when love, compassion, communal
solidarity and collective care fail is grimly exposed
By Jonathan Jones

A baby is being desperately extracted from a sewer pipe in this utterly
grotesque image. Some pictures are moving because they make you sympathise
with victims of violence. This one exerts a terrible psychological hold
because the baby's release from the pipe is a macabre travesty of birth.

As in a birth, this little child emerges from an enclosed dark world into
the bright open air – but instead of growing in the nurturing womb of its
mother, it has been imprisoned inside a drain, flushed down a toilet to
die, until its cries were heard
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/28/china-baby-59-sewer-pipe>.
Born for a second time, it is a child of the sewer. We see the hopeful yet
horrible moment of this faecal birth, a monstrous image like something out
of a surrealist horror film by David Lynch.
<http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lcc5OERWCbQ/T9FYMoW-QqI/AAAAAAAABC0/5GBvZ_Uojkc/
s1600/Eraserhead.jpg>

Does this sound flippant? In China, this awful story has inspired rage,
apparently focused on the child's mother. But seeing the picture here in
Britain, far from the social realities that created it, any apparently
rational conclusions about the meaning of such a disturbing event are only
likely to be ignorant and confused. Sometimes imagination is saner than
what poses as responsible "political" discourse. It is more reasonable,
from a distance, to acknowledge the strange power of this image than to
pretend to draw any moral conclusions from it. An honest, gut response to
a picture like this is better than a supposedly sombre analysis that in
reality expresses undisclosed prejudices.

For me this poor baby is a figure of ultimate abandonment, a child whose
early hours were spent in a filthy claustrophobic tube, with injuries that
include a broken skull, fighting for life – and crying, successfully, for
help – in the darkness and dirt.

Perhaps comparisons with horror films are inadequate – this image of a
cloacal birth is worthy of the dark satirical imagination of Jonathan
Swift 
<http://www.art-wallpaper.com/11464/Hogarth+William/The+punishment+of+Lemue
l+Gulliver-1024x768-11464.jpg>. Yet surely no writer, however daring,
could come up with such a devastating image of a child betrayed at the
very start of life. The harshness of human existence when love,
compassion, communal solidarity and collective care fail, is grimly
exposed here.

Baby pictures – normal ones – elicit a fundamental human urge to say
"cute!". No doubt we are innately disposed to be tender towards images of
the newborn. But this picture shifts the perspective. Hard as it is for
adults to imagine, we were all babies once. This baby's bizarrely cruel
experience of a second, motherless, filth-drenched birth gets inside your
deepest sense of self. This is an image of a child whose birthright of
love has been flushed away.