Through her, digitally skewed, colour co-ordinated, photographic fantasies, Loretta Lux immerses us in a world gone awry, where pre-pubescent children, mostly girls, have been caught by something more than the camera. The subtle distortions of reality that Lux has wrought in these images bring a wry ambiguity; there are unsettling slippages, an asynchronicity here that mixes up the visual messages and challenges interpretation. Those key hooks of the portrait image, identity and narrative have been severely disrupted.

During the process of painting a portrait, the artist allows subtle subjective traces to slip in, often subconscious and frequently subliminal, they tend to warm the image, reflecting an empathy between sitter and painter. In Lux’s digitally manipulated photographs, however, her interventions have alienated these girls, they have become coolly detached, their visages in these chilling, startling images, somewhat reminiscent of the children in the 1960’s sci-fi movie The Village of the Damned, adapted from John Wyndham’s novel, The Midwich Cuckoos. Under her influence, caught in a time warp, sucked into in the limbo of mythical space, they become denizens of some modern fairy tale. In The Drummer, 2004, where the girl’s impassive stare seems to bore right through us, we can imagine her drumming obsessively into eternity.

The ubiquity of the digital image has had a self-defeating effect, indexical credibility has been derailed, we anticipate the tricks and yawn at the fantasies. Lux, however, uses digital trickery to create psychologically tense and disturbing images that, despite their selectively flawed realities, seem to chafe at our psychic sensibilities. In The Walk, 2004, the faux sophistication of these young girls, whose presence here can only be described as tentative and transitory, has a distinctly uncanny edge. Emerging femmes fatales, these girls have erected barriers against the world, screens that not only separate them from a threatening world but also from the comfort and safety of childhood, of ludic naivete – the paradoxes abound.

In their photographic works, both Inez van Lamsweerde and Wendy McMurdo have digitally re-shaped the worlds of pre-pubescent girls while Rineke Dijkstra and Hellen van Meene have explored the vulnerability of girls just over that threshold of pubescence, all are works which probe and examine those interfaces between individual perplexities and cultural expectations. More controversial is Juergen Teller’s photographic series Go Sees, images of prospective young fashion models soliciting for work at his studio door. In all this work there is an underlying sense of angst, of insecurity, of individuality pitted against the world. In contrast, Lux’s young girls look disarmingly confident and composed, unruffled and unfazed, steeled through the transformed contextualities of their digitally twisted realities. Only in the photographs of their daughters by Sally Mann and Annalies Strba, do we witness that same composure in front of the camera, but here it was a familiarity with the presence of the camera that induced such apparent ease and sense of diffidence. These contradictions, symptomatic of Lux’s approach to the portraiture of children serve to challenge our preconceptions of childhood while satirising the erosion of childhood by our increasingly materialistic culture.