Harris, Ray |

I’m a great fan of Ray Harris and his blog Novel Activist, which includes not only ongoing commentary on children in art from a position identical to my own, but also excerpts from his novels and his photographs from counterculture events he has attended. I see in his photographs children who are happy and free, mentally and emotionally healthy youngsters not weighed down by the body guilt and sexual paranoia that many modern kids are cursed to live with. Growing up in rural America in the 1970s, I experienced some of that joy, in the sense of being allowed to ramble freely in around the woods and backroads where I lived. However, I only got half of the experience. Unlike the hippie children in Harris’s photos, me, my sister and my cousins were made to keep our clothes on, at least after we started school. Boys and girls did not bathe or change together. Nor did we skinny dip or frolic in the cool mud wearing nothing but smiles. I really feel that we missed out there, and I’m a little saddened by it.