Where Children Sleep: James Mollison’s Poignant Photographs
What the Amazon rainforest has to do with the Kaisut Desert and Fifth Avenue luxury.
On the heels of this morning’s homage to where children read and learn comes a curious look at where they sleep. That’s exactly what Kenyan-born, English-raised, Venice-based documentary photographer James Mollison explores in Where Children Sleep — a remarkable series capturing the diversity of and, often, disparity between children’s lives around the world through portraits of their bedrooms. The project began on a brief to engage with children’s rights and morphed into a thoughtful meditation on poverty and privilege, its 56 images spanning from the stone quarries of Nepal to the farming provinces of China to the silver spoons of Fifth Avenue.
From the start, I didn’t want it just to be about ‘needy children’ in the developing world, but rather something more inclusive, about children from all types of situations. It seemed to make sense to photograph the children themselves, too, but separately from their bedrooms, using a neutral background.” ~ James Mollison
Perhaps most interestingly, the book was written and designed as an empathy tool for 9-to-13-year-olds to better understand the lives of other children around the world, but it is also very much a poignant photographic essay on human rights for the adult reader.
7-year-old Indira works at a granite quarry and lives in a one-room house near Katmandu, Nepal, with her parents, brother and sister.
4-year-old Jasmine has participated in over 100 child beauty pageants and lives in a large house in the Kentucky countryside.
4-year-old Romanian boy who shares a mattress with his family in the outskirts of Rome.
8-year-old Justin plays football, basketball and baseball. He lives in a four-bedroom house in New Jersey.
Alyssa lives in a small wooden house with her family in Appalachia.
8-year-old Ahkohxet belongs to the Kraho tribe and lives in Brazil's Amazon basin.
9-year-old Dong shares a room with his parents, sister and grandfather, growing rice and sugar cane in China's Yunnan Province.
9-year-old Delanie aspires to be a fashion designer and lives with her parents and younger siblings in a large house in New Jersey.
9-year-old Tsvika and his siblings share a bedroom in an apartment in the West Bank, in a gated Orthodox Jewish community known as Beitar Illit.
9-year-old Jamie shares a top-floor apartment on New York's Fifth Avenue with his parents and three siblings. The family's two other homes are in Spain and the Hamptons.
10-year-old Ryuta is a champion sumo-wrestler living in Tokyo with his family.
12-year-old Lamine sleeps in a room shared with several other boys in the Koranic school in their Senegalese village.
11-year-old Joey, who killed his first deer when he was seven, lives in Kentucky with his family.
14-year-old Irkena is a member of the semi-nomadic Rendille tribe in Kenya and lives with his mother in a temporary homestead in the Kaisut Desert.
14-year-old Prena is a domestic worker in Nepal and lives in a cell-like room in the attic of the house where she works in Katmandu.
14-year-old Erien slept on the floor of her favela abode in Rio de Janeiro until the late stages of her pregnancy.
15-year-old Risa is training to be a geisha and shares a teahouse with 13 women in Kyoto, Japan.
Mollisey is represented by MAP and Flatland Gallery, and published by Chris Boot.
Where Children Sleep is reminiscent of Peter Menzels’s voyeuristic tours of the world through people’s diets and possessions, and JeongMee Yoon’s look at the conditioning of children’s gender identity through the color schemes of their bedrooms. The book’s glow-in-the-dark cover, a-la Radioactive, is a wonderfully playful cherry on top.
All images courtesy of James Mollison via The New York Times
This article is reprinted with permission from the author, Maria Popova -- a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, and is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings.
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12 Past Reflections
On Aug 16, 2012 BEE wrote:
What a great article. I showed this article to my 11 yr old daughter. She was sad & and thought how hectic the world was, as some can be so lucky & other live in such hectic conditions...I asked her if she thought that she is lucky herself for staying in a beautiful 3 bedroom home herself, being the only child. She said yes but still felt sad. i told her that live is what you make of it & that she has unlimited potential to become whatever she wanted to be in the world...she smiled & said she wanted to help the world people & children from this kind of sadness...
Maybe we have the next female president of south Africa coming up...yeah!
B
On Aug 6, 2012 Heatha blue wrote:
ugh the contrast makes me cringe. I am American but I now have 2 more reasons to stay away from Kentucky...blah. I look forward to reading the book, though. It is thought provoking. I love photography. What I wonder is if the photographer asked the children if they were happy.
2 replies: Bhoutik, Dailygood | Post Your Reply
On Mar 24, 2012 Arlene7 wrote:
And there are no smiling, happy children here. Most photographers ask for a smile. Why not here?? The rich seem more miserable than the poor but they are all so stoic.
On Oct 19, 2011 Arundebnath, London wrote:
Great photos that tell a trillion and one stories. From my recent experience in Kolkata, India, I think this book should have included at least one children's home on the very very busy footpath [with almost no path at all] on very very congested streets of Kolkata. Children are born and reared in such "foot-path homes". One must see with one's eyes to believe and comprehend but not noticed by the government, politicians and most importantly, the intellectual middle-classes of Kolkata [its sons and daughters are scattered all over the world enjoying life to the fullest - at whose cost ?, I wonder !
On Sep 12, 2011 Psranjal wrote:
At least if the children of Haves start appreciating their blessings over the children of Have Nots this will serve some purpose. However will they ever understand the hunger pangs, feeling of insecurity, problems of child pregnancy............ God Save this world from the most cruel......i.e. the selfish human being. ( I do not want to refer animals as cruel, because they do every thing for their survival or when they are threatened. Whereas a highly evolved(?) animal called human being more often does whatever he feels like for entertainment , self gratification etc coming out of selfish thoughts.
On Sep 10, 2011 Dwayne Henshilwood wrote:
Its hard to measure privilege but easy to compare, and that comparison is uncomfortable from my comfortable home !
1 reply: Catie | Post Your Reply
On Sep 9, 2011 bluebuddha wrote:
A thought-provoking article. Nothing shows the disparity and the diversity of the world like the places where people rest their head at night, especially children. Thanks for bringing awareness to this.
On Sep 9, 2011 Tara Gill wrote:
Amazing photographs. The one thing that occurs to me is that North Americans assume (not all) that just because we have more money and fancy stuff in our rooms that we are better off. I beg to differ. Who do you think are the happiest people here?
1 reply: Sharing | Post Your Reply
On Sep 9, 2011 Holy sadness batman wrote:
All poster children for birth control. Made me really sad. Especially the American kids. The planet needs a good pandemic. Sad for the world. We're all just creepy animals overpopulating the world.
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On Sep 9, 2011 Yvonneefernando wrote:
Thought provoking and insightful. Its hard to say much..
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On Sep 9, 2011 Neil wrote:
Well, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case it's ten thousand...
On May 19, 2013 Graeme Stuart wrote:
Some wonderful thought provoking photos. I know things don't make us happy and that the world cannot support the over-consumption of the rich countries - but it is so hard to get put this knowledge into practice.
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