What Are We Looking at?

In the case of the young girl bleeding from her mouth, something bad is likely to have occurred. The painterly and dark quality of the photograph questions this as the evidence could have been added. Spilled blood, the loss of blood, in photographs, is mostly the milieu of war correspondents, child services, and forensic crime scene photography. When it comes to the most defenseless, children and animals, images of this type become proportionally more disturbing and even enraging. It is therefore not unreasonable to say that we have negative responses when it comes to seeing blood and that we are automatically on our guard.

Blood sacrifices in ancient rituals, leeches to cure disease, and mythologies about drinking one's enemies' blood to imbibe their strength don't do much to rehabilitate our immediate associations and in many cases continue to shock. In the end, blood reminds us of our mortality and the younger the depicted person bleeding, the sadder this becomes. Just as we have learned about the horrors of old we also know of the contemporary ones, the biological and chemical agents that cause hemorrhaging of the organs that lead to bleeding from the orifices. As much as we don't want to think about such things, a staggered wave of associations, some conscious and some more peripheral, intrude on our psyche and the assumptions continue to trend negative even further.

How Can the Image Be Interpreted?

Images where blood is worn as a badge of honor tend to be those which continue to celebrate testosterone in modern contexts, though they too have ancient roots and are ritualistic. Boxing comes to mind, the modern-day gladiator who, while bloodied, has bested his opponent and raises his hands in victory. Though there is now also female boxing, the subject in this photograph is not portrayed in a way that would suggest such a context. She looks neither victorious nor defeated. If anything, if we had to commit to naming her expression, I see a calmness, maybe defiance, but most of all the staring eyes suggest that while she is clearly looking at her audience she sees something elsewhere, something deeper, than that which is right in front of her. Then there is the tradition of the “first kill shot.” No, not the one fired by the gun. The subsequent one, the one fired by the camera when the novice removes his first kill's still warm heart and often smears the animal's blood across his face, indicating a rite of passage, another successful step into manhood and into the realm of the hunter.

One may wonder what causes such behavior, such a need to eradicate the empathy for another; and while complex and even skillful in their execution, blood sports may hold at bay some fear, for a hunter is not the hunted, at least not until a bigger predator to shows up. The lineage of such impulses in our brains is lost in the distant past, where the need to assert dominance among peers and the hunting of animals may well have meant the difference between life and death.

Before we become too condemnatory about the death, say, of a deer, whose natural predators are often absent and whose numbers, therefore, need to be culled by other means to keep a herd healthy, we might acknowledge that a deer living in nature and shot cleanly has had a far better life and death than the millions of factory farmed animals who are summarily stunned, and sometimes not effectively, before being sucked into an automated animal carcass disassembly line.

Conclusion

Jutta's portrait of the melancholic look on the girl's face does indeed speak to all of that and more. It speaks to the incomprehensible fragility, delight, and despair of so many lives we will never know but to which we are never the less connected. In this regard Jutta has, at one and the same time, both profoundly reminded us and brilliantly misdirected us.

In fact the image is of her daughter. What is about to occur, as the light appears to be fading from this image, is a visit from the tooth fairy. Yes, Jutta's daughter has lost a baby tooth, another ritual of passage. Imagine if her mother had washed her face, then made her hold out the tooth on her hand as a trophy with a smile on her face. That image would have lost all its strength, that engaging subtext beyond the subject matter. It would have joined the ranks of thousands like it, and the wounds of growing up and learning about the world would not for a moment have entered the discourse of the image. For all we know, this might have been the last of the teeth her body replaced and now she knows there will be no more.