Artworks

Loretta Lux

German, b. 1969

Milo 2, 2004

Chromogenic color print

11 3/4 x 11 3/4 in. (29.85 x 29.85 cm)

Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund, 2005

Some kids are tough to love. Or perhaps it is reckoning with childhood that is tough for adults, having outgrown it for the realities of later life — responsibility, cynicism, disenchantment. It seems anyone who is no longer a child encounters difficulty understand kids these days.

Loretta Lux uses digital techniques to combine her subjects, mostly children, with backgrounds photographed separately. (She doesn't divulge any other manipulations.) It is a method that seems to suck the air out of the space, making dialogue between subject and viewer all the more complicated.