Meanwhile, in Chimneysweeptopia….
A while ago, I read William Blake’s poem (a statement that can never end happily,) “The Chimney Sweeper” (case in point.) Its solution to child labor— “If you meekly go about your horrifically brutal occupation with a song in your heart and a spring in your step, you, too, can find eventual happiness in the arms of the Lord!”— so infuriated me that I wrote a whole pompous tirade on the matter. How is it, I shrieked, that we continue to romanticize what was probably one of the most inhumane jobs of the modern era? To punctuate this statement, I decided to go on the hunt for heart-rending photographs of climbing boys… but instead, I found this fellow, who has spent the past month steadily deflating my argument against chimney sweep romanticization.
This photograph was taken in 1860 by William Carrick, a Scottish portraitist who, after setting up shop in St. Petersburg (uh…) discovered just how difficult the portrait business could be in a city with neither sunlight nor spending money. To boost his sales, he took a series of photographs of the “ideal Russian types”— evidently, curiosity around Russia’s itinerant peasantry was such that this seemed a feasible artistic endeavor. That’s right: my chimney sweep has spent the past 152 years existing as eye candy. Let’s just look at him once more, shall we?
That button nose! That bone structure! Those pouty lips! That BMI! His stance and frightened-deer expression seem to be looted directly from a male modeling catalog. Oh, and did I mention the… are those TOMS?
(Источник: flyte-sebastian-flyte)
