To misquote Freud’s apocrypha: sometimes a lollipop is just a lollipop. Even though the photograph is named for them – rather, because the photograph is named for them – the lollipops in the girls’ hands are a distraction, a mischievous diversion (Figure 10.1). If, as seems likely, the sweets were a means of occupying the girls’ attention, keeping them still before the large-format camera, then the title of the image extends the beguilements of the portrait scenario. My eyes are drawn to the lollipops, as to the huge bow in little Mina’s hair, as to the white kitten cuddled under her cousin Elizabeth’s arm. But they are also turned away from these cute details, from these girls, who are drenched in a brightness that obscures almost as much as it illuminates. Pooling at the bottom of the stairs, washing about the room, this same light carries the series of looks that structure the image. Mina looks sidelong at Elizabeth, as Mina’s mother, Hermine, looks over at her from the doorway by the stairs, and as her grandmother, Gertrude – who operates the camera – looks on at them both. In this chapter, I argue that this scene of looking, with its circuit of women’s and children’s gazes, offers a new vantage on the practices and effects of modernist photography in the United States, as they developed in proximity to the material, vernacular and feminised visual cultures of modernity.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Gertrude Käsebier was one of the most successful portrait photographers in the US, celebrated especially for her luminous, dreamy depictions of white mothers and their children. ‘Lollipops’ was taken in 1910, and it sits alongside Käsebier’s earlier and better-known pictures of motherhood, such as ‘Blessed Art Thou among Women’ and ‘The Manger (Ideal Motherhood)’ (Figures 10.2 and 10.3). Like these images, as Laura Wexler argues, ‘Lollipops’ ‘glorifies white women’s role within the domestic sphere’ and reflects Käsebier’s investment in discourses of child education that emerged in the late nineteenth century (2000: 182). Hermine Turner, Käsebier’s daughter, is presented as the modern, middle-class mother following the methods advocated by Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten movement. As Ann Taylor Allen has explained, Froebel’s doctrine of ‘spiritual motherhood’ called for child-rearing practices that balanced attention and inattention, ‘careful tending and unforced growth’ (1982: 319, 322).