Pictures such as "The Murmur of the Innocents 1" (2009) and "The Murmur of the Innocents 3" (2010) portray children, based on Helnwein's photographs, faintly menaced by presences outside the frame that we finally recognize as the artist's and our own.
He collaborates with the children he photographs and paints, so their appearance cloaked in military jackets or bandaged and smeared with stage blood represents something of their impulses, not merely his own. We can never tell where the boundaries lie in Helnwein's work between improvisation and prompting, fiction and documentation.