Melissa Nolas, the Director of the Childhood Publics Research Programme, writes about new pilot research on identifying and understanding early, childhood forays into photographic practice, and invites anyone identifying as a ‘child photographer’ to get in touch with her.
If I think of my childhood in terms of objects, beyond my toys, I would say that I grew up in the company of books and photographs (as well as lots of my Greek grandmother’s needlework, but that’s a completely different blog post/project!) Specifically, as far as photographs and photography is concerned, I am thinking of my mother’s Asahi Pentax which doubled up as our family camera. Wherever we went, growing up, the camera came with, documenting holidays, excursions, birthdays, anniversaries, and special events – July 1987 Athens heatwave, anyone?
My mother’s camera, the only camera in our home for a long time, was precious to her, we were only occasionally allowed to hold it and take a photograph with it. I took a few of those weathering-the-heatwave-on-the-balcony-in-a-1.5 x 1.5-metres-plastic-orange-inflatable-paddling-pool photos. I know this less from the very vague recollection of doing so – while an exceptional event at the time, it was also quite mundane, and more because those photographs I am not in are photographically unruly, a bit crooked and off-centre. Largely, however, the Pentax was out of bounds to me and my sister. It was around this time that I must have gotten the idea to save up my pocket money to buy my own camera.
My first camera was a Kodak Disc camera which I got a year later at 9.5 years old, and the first set of photographs I ever had developed were of my 10th birthday party – celebrated a few months early given that, as a late summer baby living in a country where schools don’t start until mid-September, most of my friends were still away on the day of my actual birthday.
From the Kodak Disc I graduated to a Nikon One Touch 200 Point and Shoot which went everywhere with me documenting mine and my friends’ teenage years well into university and beyond. Battered from use, on the other side of my mid-20s, the Nikon gave way to an Olympus Super Zoom Point and Shoot, a camera which met an untimely death in a canoe off the coast of Panama leaving the rest of my visit there to be documented with a disposable camera that ultimately opened up a new photographic chapter for me in (D)SLR photography.
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I could get really carried away here (and in the draft of this post I did!) and tell you my life story in cameras, but I won’t. I share these early memories of photography here because they are in part the inspiration for a pilot project I am currently working on called Hide and Seek: Looking for Children’s Photography in Family Spaces, and for which I am seeking people to interview. Children’s photographic practices in everyday life are very much under-researched, we know surprisingly little about them.
As my colleague Christos Varvantakis and I wrote a little while ago children only get to be photographers in very bounded – I want to say circumspect, circumstances: in formal and informal educational settings with projects of various hues, as entrants in photographic competitions, and as participants in research.
In terms of the latter context, and as an example of another background to Hide and Seek, those of you who have been following the work of the Childhood Publics Research Programme over the last ten years will, of course, know my/our work using photography in research with children and how, from that research on the Connectors Study, the Children’s Photography Archive was born.
But I am absolutely convinced that both now and in the past, children from middle childhood onwards (maybe younger too) have been more actively taking up cameras, occupying the role of photographer, and documenting their own, their families, and friends everyday lives as well as the comings and goings of where they live and what they do.
In the context of understanding children as producers of culture (another under-researched area), I think finding out more about these childhood photographic practices is a gap in knowledge that is worth filling. If you are one of these people who has been taking photographs from a young age then I would love to hear from you!
A few more details:
- * To take part you need to be over 18 and there is no upper age limit. While I will eventually get to contemporary childhood photographic practices in everyday life I am currently working on this problem backwards because my focus is on photographic practices and I want to be able to locate these practices in time and space.
- * You don’t have to be a professional photographer, in fact in some ways it would be better if you were not. You don’t even need to consider yourself an amateur photographer, and it really doesn’t matter what your occupation is now. I am interested in photography as an everyday aesthetic, memory, and relational practice so the main thing is that you took photographs as a child and have perhaps sustained this practice throughout your life (gaps and lapses are okay too!)
- * Bonus: if you have kept some of your early photographs from that time and would be willing to share those in the interview that would be amazing but you can still do the interview without the photos.
- * For those who have photos, there is the option to archive these early photos with the Children’s Photography Archive. Further details available upon request.
- * Interviews will take place in English but there are no restrictions on where you currently live (I’ll deal with the analytical headache this is will create afterwards!).
- * Interviews will take place on Teams/Zoom.
- * Interviews are likely to take roughly an hour (unless we ended up geeking out on cameras and camera models then I can’t guarantee that we’ll only be an hour!).
- To take part email me at either sevasti [dot] nola [at] gmail [dot] com or childrensphotographyarchive [at] gmail [dot] com
- More information about the Hide and Seek project here, including information sheets and consent forms.
- The research has been approved by Goldsmiths, University of London (REISC1795) and is supported through the GRIPP Internship and match funding from the Department of Sociology Research Development Fund, as well as Discretionary Funding derived from my ERC Starting Grant and Proof of Concept Grants. I am working with three brilliant young researchers on this project: Ellie Goodman, Pheroza Mottram, and Noemi Urpi.
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When I was writing this post, and looking at those heatwave photographs, I admit I had a moment of confusion. The quality of the images were not the same as the prints from the Asahi Pentax (that camera, when it works, makes the most beautiful photos). They are of a much lower quality, a bit grainy, more like the product of a point-and-shoot. Had I taken them with my Kodak Disc after all or was I misremembering, mixing up calendar time, memories, and events?
As it happens, and when I checked the veracity of the first paragraph of this post with my mother and showed her the photos I was referring to, we worked out that it hadn’t been the Asahi Pentax those heatwave photographs were taken with. Instead it was another point-and-shoot Pentax that I had forgotten she had bought around that time, and which certainly does not hold the same iconic status in my imagination.
I share this coda here because it is emblematic of some of what I’m hoping to document with this project. The what we take photos with may be important, a conversation starter, but the what we take photos of and why, is what really interests me. While the graininess of the image was one thing I noted, the other was the shimmer of pure joy. Somewhere in the recesses of my memory I can also access the feeling that goes with horsing around with one’s parents before everyone gets too old to fit in a paddling pool.