‘Hannah Montana’ course takes on popular images of childhood

Not so long ago, the airwaves were buzzing with news about Miley Cyrus—the 15-year-old pop star behind Disney’s “Hannah Montana” — and her provocative photo shoot in Vanity Fair.

But while reporters and pundits found much to talk about in the tousled, waiflike figure at the center of the photos, Catherine Emihovich and Rebecca Nagy find just as many important details in the margins.

“Notice the backdrop in this picture,” Nagy said, as a class of college seniors looked at a photo from the Vanity Fair shoot. “In the corner of the photograph, she (photographer Annie Liebowitz) shows you the edge of the backdrop, and the landscape beyond.”

“That’s not an accident, it’s deliberate” Emihovich chimed in. “Images in the media don’t just happen, they’re very carefully crafted.”

Emihovich, dean of the University of Florida College of Education, joined forces with Nagy, the director of the Harn Museum of Art, to give undergraduate students a deeper look at the depiction of children in the media this summer, through a class titled “From Innocence to Hannah Montana: Childhood through the Visual Arts.”

The class gave students a historical overview of the way children have been portrayed in the arts from the Renaissance to the present day. Despite the lost innocence implied in its title, the class isn’t just a critique of pop culture in the age of Britney Spears. It’s a look at how artists have constructed images of childhood—and a look at the sometimes unsettling relationship between adult artists and their young subjects, who are often too young to wield power over their own public image. Topics range from the photography of “Alice in Wonderland” author Lewis Carroll to the controversial work of present-day artist Sally Mann, whose work includes nude photos of her own adolescent children.

One goal of the class, Emihovich said, is to get students to think deeply about the cascade of visual images they are exposed to on a daily basis.

“We see these images all the time, and we think they are simple, but they aren’t,” she said. “There’s a whole story that goes on underneath the surface, a whole history of prior images, and the people who construct these pictures are using that history to intentionally create an effect.”

Nagy notes that the images in the Vanity Fair shoot—the rumpled bedsheets, the coy , come-hither expression, and the provocatively reclining female figure—were common images in exoticized 19th- century paintings.

“Of course, those scenes were always set in a harem in Turkey or some other imagined, far-off location where they were safely distant,” she said. “These are a little closer to home, and that makes us think a little
differently about what is being suggested.”

The class was conducted as a “blended” course — a hybrid of old-fashioned classes and 21^st-Century online learning. Much of the class is conducted online through a series of rigorous assignments—but students meet at the Harn to view original works of art—including items from the museums art storage—and to present their projects.

It’s not just another trendy, pop-culture-based humanities course. In fact, the course was already in the advanced planning stages when the Vanity Fair photo shoot became headline news. Emihovich, an anthropologist by training, taught courses on media depictions of children at Florida State University over a decade ago.

“This is a class that draws on art history, sociology and a number of other disciplines, and I think that multidisciplinary approach is something we need to emphasize more often,” Emihovich said. “We need to give students the chance to see the Big Picture, which is something that is often missing in education, particularly in the age of the FCAT.”