Blind Man's Bluff

The act of looking or not looking is a seminal aspect of all three of these images by Clarence H. White. Here a blindfolded girl participates in an age-old childhood game, groping helplessly, yet she appears more stricken than entertained. Undoubtedly allegorical, the image refers in some murky Victorian way to the passage from girlhood into womanhood. It is an electric combination of the soft-focus Pictorialist aesthetic and loaded subject matter. Women and children were two of White's favourite subjects. Typically, he represented women in a highly romanticized manner, while he portrayed children as fresh and apparently innocent.