Olivier Suter: ChildrenPaperback, 17 March 2020

A gorgeous faux-leatherbound album compiling childhood portraits of the famous and the infamous, from Jimi Hendrix to Al Capone

Produced in a beautiful, faux-nubuck, pocket-sized format with marbled endpapers, Children collects the soft, fresh faces of future writers, artists, scientists, gangsters, killers and dictators. Could this sleepy-looking kid be Jimi Hendrix? This ill-humored youngster, glowering amid his classmates: Arthur Rimbaud in the making? And 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?

Swiss artist and teacher Olivier Suter (born 1959) has assembled this album, inviting us to inevitably make inferences about character and future lives from these images. Others depicted here as children include Neil Armstrong, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Simone de Beauvoir, Fidel Castro, Walt Disney, Sigmund Freud, Serge Gainsbourg, Bill Gates, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-Un, Yves Klein, Édouard Manet, Jim Morrison, Jesse Owens, Fernando Pessoa, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Patti Smith, Mike Tyson, Robert Walser and Frank Zappa.