Your Nickname: Understandably, many readers of this site prefer to write comments and articles under an alias. Many of you have requested that a nickname appear when making comments. Members can do this themselves by logging in then selecting ‘users’. Your profile should appear. Under ‘nickname’, you can enter a new name and then just below it, select that new nickname under ‘name appears as’. From then on, your alias will appear when you make comments.

150 Years of Photographing Children: A reader came forward with an interesting link to a project dedicated to the photography of children from 1865 to 2023. Some of the names will be familiar but many will undoubtedly not be. Images are categorized by date, by artist name or by theme.

Nude in the News: One of our Russian readers gave me a lead years ago about a newspaper that actually requested pictures of naked children from its readers to publish. I planned to do a post on this because a website actually posted the relevant images. Now there is a new site with a little more detail about the context of this promotion. Because these images were scanned from a newspaper, they are of low fidelity, but still one can get a clear idea of the range of ages, poses and props in the photographs submitted. In addition to extensive details about this story, this website has pages covering numerous portrayals of nudity with a number of items clearly gleaned from Pigtails. I am told that many other leads came from this site which focuses on female underage nudity and makes a special point of only sharing examples which are not lascivious.

Brooke Shields’ Attitudes: After reading the post on Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby starring Brooke Shields, a reader did some additional research which I thought would be of interest to others. I have appended this material to the end of that post. We also received a nice testimonial from that reader which I reproduce here:

In the first instance, I am writing to compliment you on your splendid website, which I have followed for some time now. I enjoy seeing the beautiful artwork and reading the thoughtful and well researched articles. You tackle topics that are often neglected and avoided by others. Your dedication and resilience in keeping the site going in the face of attacks from a number of quarters is also really commendable. I’m sure it can’t have been easy, and you must have had dark days of doubt. I hope you will be able to continue.

Follow Up on Goebbels Children: I did a post based on a Graham Ovenden poem regarding the group suicide of the children of Joseph and Magda Goebbels during the defeat of Nazi Germany during WWII. A reader did a little digging and offered more details which were appended to the end of that post.

Digging into Divine Forms: A woman who runs a web page was drawn to our site in the course of researching Azuma Itsuko. One of the discoveries was that the books of this artist were published by Sanrio Co., Ltd. who also publish the famous Hello Kitty materials. The Sanrio fan page can be found here.

On the Store Shelf: I have often wondered about the models—babies, toddlers and very young children—on the packages of diapers, training pants and the like. Are these real people? Or a photo-realistic rendering of an artist? I ask these questions because I imagine that being known as a diaper model might attract ridicule later in life and one would not want images of oneself on the packages in the local store. Well, it appears that these are images are of real people and I came across a story of a little girl being filmed while discovering her image on packages in a local store. Perhaps these name brands are responsible enough to move on to other models after a little while, but now there’s another problem: now that this video is on the internet, will this girl ever be able to genuinely put her past behind her? Or will she continue to harbor a kind of strange pride about this stage in her “career”?