Beautiful Adolescents

Photographer: me

Angel Sinclair of Models of Diversity recently posted a link on the Mature Models page on FB to a BBC viewpoint by Sara Ziff.
I found the piece very enlightening. Models are under pressure to be thin and are often subjected to unsolicited sexual advances, says Sara. This is something we have known for a long time, it is the ugly side of modelling.
But what really struck a chord with me was that far too often we seem to turn a blind eye to the fact that these girls that grace the catwalks and appear made up and dressed up in fashion magazines are more often than not, children. Sara discusses the "Peter Pan" syndrome in fashion:
"For a long time the industry has relied on a labour force of children, and they are valued for their adolescent physique. It's this obsession not just with youth, but really with extreme youth, that's the problem. A 13-year-old girl can be naturally skinny, like a beanpole, in a way that a grown woman, who has hips and breasts, generally can't - and shouldn't aspire to be. And I think we need to ask ourselves why that's become the ideal. Why do we have this perverse fascination with images of such young girls who are so small and inexperienced and really quite vulnerable?"
She continues: "It messes with the glamour if you stop to wonder, is this girl 13? Is there a clause in her agency contract that she cannot gain more than 2cm on her hips? Shouldn't she be in school?"
I'd like to reflect further on this issue of extreme youth and beauty, and the exploitation of young people it leads to, as also the fascination our culture has with adolescent beauty, a fascination that is historical.
Back in the 1970s the Italian film director Luchino Visconti made a screen version of Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice, written at the start of the 20th century. It is the story of Aschenbach, a middle aged, married, musician in the film but a writer in Mann's novella, who falls desperately and obsessively in love with a young Eastern European boy, Tadzio, while holidaying in a cholera struck Venice. Mann's book is full of symbolism and is a story of aestheticism and decadence, a meditation on ageing as a process and the loss of youth. To Aschenbach, Tadzio is the incarnation of an ancient Greek ideal of beauty. Nothing ever passes between them, apart from glances and Aschenbach dies of cholera on the day of Tadzio's departure.

 

The film is superbly acted by Dirk Bogarde and the beautiful Tadzio is fifteen year old Bjorn Andresen, who at the time became famous as "the Most Beautiful Boy in the World". And beautiful he was. Visconti had scoured the whole of Europe to find him when planning the film. But that was a stigma as far as Bjorn was concerned, something that affected him for the rest of his life. In 2003 he was interviewed by the Guardian, following a controversy with writer Germaine Greer who had used his photograph, without asking for his permission, as the cover of her book The Beautiful Boy, which was about "the boy as the missing term in the discussion of the possibility of the female gaze". Greer had requested the photo from the copyright owner, who granted her permission to publish it. It never occurred to her to ask Bjorn, who was "the model". "I feel used" said Bjorn "I have a feeling of being utilised that is close to distasteful".

And during the interview out comes the story of how while filming, Visconti and the crew took him to a gay bar and how he was being looked at, scrutinised by those present. "I am not homophobic" he says. But being subject to the gaze of adult men who saw him as "a nice meaty dish" made him very uncomfortable to say the least.

For Bjorn being the Most Beautiful Boy in the World became a burden, throughout his life.  Nothing he did after Death in Venice could quite match the fame and attention he received when he was fifteen. As a grown man he was not that interesting to look at. A fate that many a young female models also encounter when they grow up.
 The issue here is that of the gaze and those who are no longer children but not yet women or men. What do we make of it?