When Children Attack

Occasionally, I come up with photo ideas that I can't quite explain in a way that makes them seem sane. Fortunately, society seems to give a little wiggle room to an artist in the sane department. How's that for an intro for one of my latest shoots. 

I think my thought process started with this shoot after seeing a little kid eating some candy or jam or something. Their hands and all around there mouth was stained red. It made me think how if you saw an adult with red liquid oozing down their face you would think something totally different. Red stains on a kid is Kool Aid and cute, on an adult it's Hannibal Lecter and disturbing. 

This led me to think of my family dog Luna. My parents love to buy her stuffed animal squeaker toys. Luna then will not rest until she has totally destroyed the animal, ripped out all it's stuffing and gotten to it's squeaker and killed it with a righteous and holy vengeance. She's always so proud of herself after this act, parading the stuffed animal carcass around the house and plopping it on your lap in an attempt to get you to play tug-of-war with it. 

Blend all this together in my sort of sane mind and this is what you get. 

Often photo ideas take on a life of their own. Sometimes what you are left with is quite a bit different than what you originally dreamed up. In this case, what I dreamed up came to life almost too well. I got a white teddy-bear at a Goodwill and then bought some red syrup for the blood. But, as soon as I started pouring the blood on the decapitated bear I realized wow...this looks really realistic. Perhaps TOO realistic. Perhaps years of therapy after this trauma realistic. 

I cut back a bit on the original carnage that I had planned for ole teddy. Still when I brought in the little girl she refused to look at the bear, much less touch it. My original idea had her holding part of it. That was not happening. In fact she didn't even want anything to do with the syrup. Eventually, with her mom bribing her with M&Ms and her sister and babysitter dancing behind me to distract her and make her laugh I got what I needed and compromised by letting the bear stay on the floor. 

The girl's mom told me later that her older sister who is four told her after watching the shoot that there "Mommy there was something REALLY wrong with that bear!" Boy the fun I'll have when I have kids...poor kids.