Images of children that might make you squirm

Bottom line: A mixed bag. Some of the photographer’s images of children are thoughtful and layered, while others veer toward the superficial.

Photographer Tierney Gearon has often courted controversy. Photographs from her 2001 debut show at London’s Saatchi Gallery featuring her naked children were threatened with seizure by British police.

Gearon, who was born in Atlanta, but lives in Los Angeles, is the kind of artist who reveals the guts of her life in her art, whether in those frank portraits of her children, or in directors Peter Sutherland and Jack Youngelson’s powerful documentary film about Gearon and her relationship with her mentally ill mother, “The Mother Project.”

But don’t go to Gearon’s solo show at Atlanta’s Jackson Fine Art, featuring work from “Colorshape” and “Alphabet,” expecting that same sort of raw intimacy and access. Though her work in the Jackson Fine Art show is far from controversial, the way children are portrayed may trigger a degree of squirminess in viewers.

Gearon’s images from her series “Alphabet” suggest the Harmony Korine film of New York City youth gone wild “Kids” mashed up with the glossy pages of “Vogue.” Her color-drenched shots feature small children wearing creepy old people masks (little children in masks being a favorite Gearon trope) or make-believe dragging on a cigarette. Engaged in any number of “edgy” scenes, the children in these photographs can often evoke the decadent, stylized spreads in high fashion magazines, as in “Untitled (Clown Car),” featuring two shirtless preteen boys taking spray paint to a Mercedes play car like underage graffiti artists.

Gearon in many cases is revisiting familiar territory here. Like the photographer Sally Mann, who often photographed her young children, Gearon is interested in capturing children as they sometimes are, and most parents know them: quirky, funny, occasionally gruesome. Though her images of children often come off as slick and choreographed, they do get at an essential truth of childhood: that it is not the tidy, sweet-smelling package tied up with a bow it is often marketed as. Sometimes children do and say the darndest things a la Art Linkletter. But in Gearon’s images you definitely feel the presence of the photographer egging the tots on, pushing them toward these surreal vignettes — as in “Untitled (Quiet Quiver)” of a group of kids standing by the curb in front of an ordinary clapboard house handling an enormous python snake, or in “Untitled (Wonder Wig)” playing dress-up on an urban street in high heels and wig, like tiny streetwalkers.

The images are from a forthcoming children’s alphabet book. As a result, they have an illustrative tone somewhere between Gearon’s usual fashion photography and her more conceptual projects.

But for the most part Gearon is in low-key mode in this show, offering a thoughtful examination of childhood as a state of fragile solitude and contemplation, most prominently in her “Colorshape” project.

For “Colorshape” Gearon has used an interesting technique. She places her subjects — most often children, but sometimes dogs, sometimes children alongside adults — inside colored, hand-crafted Plexiglass boxes. Often those vitrines or rooms are placed in fields, forests or desert landscapes in glamorous destinations from Telluride to St. Barts that also isolate the child in space. Either because they’re in a Plexiglass box, or because Gearon clicks at the right time, the images often capture children in a pensive state, bathed in pink or yellow or green light.

The idea of conveying isolation and contemplation through this device of an isolating box is an interesting one, though Gearon muddies that theme when she also encases a pet dog in those plastic boxes, or a fish tank. The show can sometimes have a workshop feel, as if Gearon is trying out different ideas to see what works best.

The best images in “Colorshape” capture both the quirkiness of children, but also their isolation. We tend to think of children as living a fairly enchanted life, full of adventures and discovery and the kind of exploratory freedom adults kiss good-bye when they’re out of short pants. But for most children, childhood also entails moments of solitude, misunderstanding and sadness. In her technique of having children sit inside or hold those plastic cubes or circles in front of them, she articulates that separation from the world and the mysterious side of children’s lives.