It marked a bizarre moment in the nail-biting final match of the British Premier League season. Adopted from the fanatical supporters of the Polish football club Lech Poznań, Manchester City fans started to do the so-called ‘Poznan’: a type of dance in which fans hold on to each others’ shoulder and bounce on the spot. Though crucially, rather than facing the extraordinarily eventful match unfolding on the pitch, the ‘Poznan’ is performed with the back turned to the game. The rarity of these celebrations (usually reserved for finals, calls of honour, or a derby), is matched by the sheer spectacle that these celebrations create.

Lech Poznań supporters at Manchester City, 21 October 2010

From a distance, as the supporters frantically jump with their back turned to the game, the supporters create the effect of a cascading waterfall. Unlike the Mexican Wave, or the ‘La Ola’, in which supporters raise their hands to create a human wave moving 360 degrees through the interior of the stadium (a celebration that always ends with disappointment as the wave ‘dies’), the fascination with the ‘Poznan’ lies in the fact that it has to be performed by nearly everyone in the respective part of the stadium for it to work.

Workers holding each others shoulders as part of the Solidarity movement Solidarność in Poland

As much as football is a team sport, the ‘Poznan’ becomes the team sport equivalent for supporters. It is a collective undertaking that is, perhaps, meant to be a collective signal to the team that their efforts are appreciated. This notion of collectivity in the ‘Poznan’ can be traced back to the Polish roots of the dance: Lech Poznań is well-known for its close ties to the Polish State Railways and the trade unions who were a crucial force in the democratisation of the country in the late 1980s under the banner Solidarity, or Solidarność. Transferred into the context of the modern game, the ‘Poznan’ signifies an appreciation towards the players, the manager, the team owner, but also, it signifies an allegiance and literally a physical bond with fellow supporters. For a brief moment, the dramatic spectacle of the game is superseded by the spectacle – a spectacle within a spectacle – created by the supporters.

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The front cover of the newest issue of Time Magazine shows a mother breastfeeding a boy who appears old enough to make himself a sandwich. The caption on the bottom right hand corner of the photograph seeks to clarify the boy’s age as it reads “Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, and her 3-year-old son”. The assumption that the boy is too old to be breastfed is the taboo that the magazine is addressing head on with this photograph by Martin Schoeller. The Washington Post writes, rather cunningly, ‘Time cover milks shocking image’.

The Time cover is of course not the first product of visual culture that seeks to provoke the viewer in such fashion: the Australian hit TV show ‘The Slap’ similarly portrayed a young mother feeding her 4-year-old boy. The boy’s constant nagging for his mother’s breast milk creates an intriguing subplot in which the husband feels increasingly ostracised and alienated from his wife. The alcoholic father seeks to overcome his jealousy with a different type of oral fixation by continuously drinking beer throughout the entire eight part series. Crucially, in a brilliant portrayal of the deeply psychoanalytical (and Freudian) conditions unfolding in the show, the father is drinking beer straight from the bottle, not too unlike a child drinking milk from a bottle.

Rosie, played by Melissa George, breastfeeding her child in ‘The Slap’, 2011

In contrast to the quasi-documentary style of ‘The Slap’ however, the Time cover is more ‘shocking’. But how? Firstly, the photograph seeks to confuse the viewer with regards to the boy’s age with one crucial detail: the boy is standing on a chair. The boy thus appears taller, and by extension, he appears older than he actually is. To illustrate that point I would suggest that the knowledge of the boy’s age is far less provocative than the photograph. In addition to that, rather than having his eyes closed or looking at his mother, the boy, rather creepily, looks towards the camera. This gaze back to the viewer implies an awareness of the camera, an awareness of a person looking at himself, and ultimately, an awareness of a person looking at himself sucking his mother’s breast. The boy’s gaze implies so many layers of looking that it could easily be confused with the gaze of an adult. This is the visual trickery in this image, that even though the boy is only 3-years-old, his height and his knowing gaze make him appear much older. His army style trousers and grey top, clothing perhaps associated with a teenager, further confuse a perception of his age.

I would suggest that the ‘shock’ lies less in the boy sucking his mother’s breast than it lies in the mother. The clue for this can be found in the headline of a blog on the Slate website: ‘Why Is This Attractive Woman Breast-Feeding This Giant Child?’ The headline implies that if the the woman was ‘unattractive’ then perhaps we wouldn’t be wondering why she is breastfeeding her child. The way the photograph was taken ultimately feeds into the perception that this woman is not simply a woman, but she is an attractive woman: her clothes accentuate her slim body, she hold her right hand on her hips much like a model in a fashion shoot, and, like her son, she looks knowingly straight into the camera.

Visual references of mother and child, at the cover shoot.

Three behind the scenes photographs from the shoot supplied by Time’s Lightbox blog indicate that the magazine and the photographer studied classical representations of breast feeding. In spite of the visual references taped on the wall of the photo studio, the photograph that was eventually chosen for the cover has few similarities with any previous form of representation: the mother does not look lovingly at her child, she does not hold her child, nor does the child hold her mother. Standing tall, the mother does not adopt a bodily position associated with nursing a child. Ignoring all these signifiers of motherhood, in the photograph, the mother does not look like a mother. This is perhaps the real ‘shock’ in the photograph: it lacks a history of representation, a history of visual references or precedents. The photograph is, in the true sense of the word, iconoclastic: it metaphorically breaks the classical and idealistic image of mother and child.

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Alessandra Sanguinetti’s photographs, recently on display in the London print room of the esteemed photography agency Magnum, seek to capture the elusive process commonly referred to as ‘coming of age’. The first six photographs in the exhibition are from a series called ‘Sweet Expectations’ in which Sanguinetti photographed young children in diverse locations including Brooklyn, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. The representation of the Americas is related to Sanguinetti’s own upbringing – born in New York though mainly brought up in Argentina. The children standing in front of Sanguinetti’s camera thus trace the photographer’s cross-cultural background split in-between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Child, Mexico, 1993

Although Sanguinetti’s subjects are young children, the small black and white photographs equally tell a story about a photographer in search of her own childhood. Perhaps as a result of this quasi self-representation, in ‘Sweet Expectations’ the children are depicted like adults. Photographed from an empathetically low vantage point, Sanguinetti’s young subjects turn into icons. In ‘Child, Mexico, 1993′ for instance, a boy is wearing a suit, his clothing and the classical architecture in the background to the photograph stand in contrast to his young age. The boy’s gaze beyond the frame of the photograph alludes to his aspirations, his desires, or as the title of the series suggests, his expectations for the future. Despite the hopefulness of the image, the boy’s hands, partially clenched into fists, perhaps suggests that his life journey is fraught with difficulties. Nearly two decades after the image was taken, one cannot help but wonder what happened to this boy (and all the other children) Sanguinetti has photographed.

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Argentine, Buenos Aires, 2005

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Argentine, Buenos Aires, 2009

Sanguinetti’s characteristically low and empathic vantage point is also discernable in a more recent body of work in which she photographed a small farming community in Argentina. The project focuses on two girls, Guille and Belinda, who Sanguinetti intermittently photographed since 1998, as they grow into young women. The original title of the series ‘On the Sixth Day’ is a reference to the Book of Genesis which proclaims that on the sixth day of creation “God commands the land to bring forth living creatures”. In this series, Sanguinetti’s photographs seek to capture the relationship between man and the animal world. Although Sanguinetti emphasizes a harmonious relationship with humans and fauna, the photographs also depict an environment that is deeply affected by a harsh climate, remoteness and poverty. Sanguinetti finds beauty in this sphere though it is the bleakness of a socially and economically impoverished environment that prevails.

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Argentine, Buenos Aires, 2007

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Argentine, Buenos Aires, 2010

Even though the majority of the exhibition focuses on Guille’s and Belinda’s surroundings in the remote farmlands of Argentina, paradoxically, the photographs reveal very little about Guille and Belinda themselves. As a result of this conceptual and narrative ambiguity, not only does the community photographed by Sanguinetti appear isolated, the various subjects within this community also appear isolated from each other. The photographs tell a story about a lonely and harsh world punctuated by the presence of the photographer. Representations of major landmarks in Guille’s and Belinda’s lives (such as a birthday signified by a cake) become lost in the grand, sometimes beautiful yet also equally surreal representation of their surroundings.

Alessandra Sanguinetti: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams is available as a book.