Children

A collection of photographs of children who grew up to become famous in a variety of fields, from literature to arts, sports, politics, and even crime. A photographic “Guess Who” of the 20th century in the making.

The photographs in Children date from different eras, as can be seen from the different kinds and styles of portraiture. Looking at these children, some of them accompanied by a mother or father, siblings or friends, we wonder at first why they were picked for this collection. Leafing through the pages, it gradually dawns on us that these are the soft fresh faces of future writers, mathematical geniuses and other famous or infamous people—including some future dictators. And then we begin puzzling over the features and expressions on their faces: Could this sleepy-looking kid be—or rather have become Jimi Hendrix? What about this ill-humored youngster amid his classmates: Arthur Rimbaud in the making? Is this here a wee Angela Merkel? And over here Al Capone as an unwashed rascal? Is that dapper lad there really a pint-sized Pope Francis? And that cheerful child Osama Bin Laden?!? We're in for some big surprises indeed!
Pseudosciences like physiognomy à la Charles le Brun, who in the 17th century believed he could tell people's characters and mental traits from their facial features, and phrenology, employed by the Belgian colonial rulers in the 1930s who divided their Rwandan subjects into Hutus and Tutsi based on measurements of their skulls—these are things of the past, and enlightened minds flatly reject racial profiling, too. Looking at the faces in Children, it's clear to us that a person's destiny is not written on their face, whether as a child or as an adult. So all we can do is gaze at a few dozen young faces that Olivier Suter presents to us and delight in or marvel at what became of these kids, who looked so very much like so many other kids in the world.

Photographs of Theodor W. Adorno, Yasser Arafat, Pele, Hannah Arendt, Neil Armstrong, Bachar al-Assad, Fred Astaire, Adele Astaire, John Logie Baird, Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pina Bausch, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Béjart, Pope Francis, Tim Berners-Lee, Thomas Bernhard, Joseph Beuys, George Orwell, Mother Teresa, David Bowie, Marlon Brando, Wernher von Braun, Bertolt Brecht, Leon Trotsky, Freddie Mercury, Alexander Calder, Maria Callas, Sophie Calle, Albert Camus, Al Capone, Truman Capote, Fidel Castro, Charlie Chaplin, Mark David Chapman, Noam Chomsky, Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill, Muhammad Ali, Kurt Cobain, Claudette Colvin, Salvador Dalí, Claude Debussy, Dalai Lama, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Marguerite Duras, Albert Einstein, Roger Federer, Anne Frank, Rosalind Franklin, Sigmund Freud, Yuri Gagarin, Serge Gainsbourg, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Federico García Lorca, Édith Piaf, Bill Gates, Charles de Gaulle, Jean-Luc Godard, Mikhail Gorbachev, Glenn Gould, Ernesto Che Guevara, Keith Haring, George Harrison, Stephen Hawking, Ernest Hemingway, Jimi Hendrix, Alfred Hitchcock, Adolf Hitler, Edwin Hubble, Aldous Huxley, Mick Jagger, Le Corbusier, Kim Jong-Un, James Joyce, Joseph Stalin, Carl Gustav Jung, Franz Kafka, Wassily Kandinsky, Buster Keaton, Paul Klee, Yves Klein, Osama bin Laden, John Lennon, Charles Lindbergh, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Rosa Luxemburg, Charles Manson, René Magritte, Édouard Manet, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diego Maradona, Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, Paul McCartney, Josephine Baker, Eddy Merckx, Angela Merkel, Jim Morrison, Robert Musil, Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Nabokov, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, Jesse Owens, Luciano Pavarotti, Georges Perec, Fernando Pessoa, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Elvis Presley, Marcel Proust, Hergé, Arthur Rimbaud, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Bertrand Russell, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sophie Scholl, Marie Curie, Patty Smith, Lady Diana, Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Tinguely, François Truffaut, Alan Turing, Mike Tyson, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Robert Walser, Andy Warhol, Ai Weiwei, Orson Welles, Queen Elizabeth II, Ludwig II, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilbur Wright, Orville Wright, Anteo Zamboni, Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, Émile Zola.

Awarded: “Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2019”.

Olivier Suter (born 1959 in Bern) is an art teacher and scenographer.

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Graphic design: Adeline Mollard.

published in December 2019

English edition

12,4 x 16,7 cm (hardcover)

288 pages (142 b/w ill.)

52.00 €

ISBN : 978-3-906803-99-9

EAN : 9783906803999

in stock