Alan S. Rout posted some baby pictures of his son, Stephen, on his website in 2000. Stephen was five months old at the time. They weren’t anything out of the ordinary, just pictures of a sweet, chubby baby who liked to smile at the camera. In one particular photo, Stephen was wearing bright red overalls and a huge toothless grin. The caption read: ”We’re really blessed. Stephen is an amazingly happy baby.”
Alan didn’t think much about the photos after posting them, or for the ten years after that. It was only when he did a casual Google search for himself a few months ago that he discovered that Stephen, or rather Stephen’s baby pictures, were famous in Japan. The image of “Aka-San” (Mr. Baby) had been sampled into thousands of others, from being added to Mount Rushmore to being superimposed over characters from popular manga cartoons.
It all started in 2004, when an anonymous user on the popular Japanese image board, 2chan, superimposed Stephen’s picture into an image from the Japanese comic “Hell Stadium” and turned it into an image macro – a simple web form that allowed users to insert captions in the cartoon bubbles on either side of the baby’s picture. Soon Stephen’s image had, as the New York Times put it, “permeated a corner of Japanese visual culture.” It was so popular at some point that Google searches for “happy baby” would produce the photograph as it’s top result.
Would you be alarmed to find that your child had unwittingly become a famous image on the other side of the world? Many parents would, but Alan Rout is sanguine about the experience. He understands that the image has nothing to do with Stephen, it’s become a kind of internet stock photo that simple represents “happy baby,” not his son.
“The meaning that a piece of work has, comes as much from what the observer brings to it as it comes from what the artist put into it,” Mr. Rout said. “I’m perhaps over-dignifying baby pictures when I talk about them as art, but I think the abstraction applies.”
