Resources

Ben Williamson, Futurelab

Each year, when the Chrisi Bailey Awards for photography, animation, digital art or video by children are announced, it is a reminder of how powerful a medium the visual image can be for young people. Chrisi Bailey was a teacher and artist dedicated to exploring how children's creative uses of photography could bring them a greater depth of understanding about the world, and the award has been running since 1988.

The current proliferation of photography equipment available to young people in the shape of mobile phones and cheap digital cameras, as well as online photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, suggests that educators and researchers might do well to pay attention to young people's photographs too.

According to Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, a sociologist at California State University in San Marcos who has worked with children's photography, this medium provides educators with the opportunity to understand children's social lives and experiences.

"Photography allows us to see children's perspectives on their own richly-textured worlds," she says. "Children's photos are a record of their thinking, ideas and perspectives. They're also resources for deepening and widening kids' field of perspective."

Clark-Ibáñez uses children's photography as the basis for in-depth interviews, and her work has specifically included researching children from poor and underprivileged backgrounds in California. Importantly, she emphasises that it should not be assumed that photographs provide a translucent window on to children's lives.

Clark-Ibáñez begins the process by providing children with disposable cameras and the brief to photograph 'things that are important to you'. The developed photographs from the returned cameras are then used as visual prompts for discussions that focus on these important things. The aim of the work is not to uncover any true objective reality, but children's subjective experiences and perspectives, and the ways in which they think about their everyday lives.

At one comprehensive school in Somerset, UK, students have been using photography to compile and collate a visual record of teenagers' leisure lives that can be used as the springboard for wider discussions with teachers about 'what matters' to them.

Provided with digital cameras, the students kept a photographic record of the places they went and the activities they were involved in during the two week Easter holiday. Afterwards, they shared these photos with each other and identified how similar or different their leisure lives were.

One of the teenagers involved in the activity, Steve, aged 15, says, "It was a portfolio of our lives. It made you think about things you don't normally think about when you're just living through them." He adds, "Seeing the different things, the ingredients of teenagers' lives, it was interesting to see what they were."

It is the surprising range of the material, experiences and memories that photography can generate that makes it a fascinating medium for young people to work with. This material, handled sensitively, can open up how educators understand both children's delights and displeasures, and how these might be acted upon to provide them with further social, educational and leisure opportunities.

In Clark-Ibáñez's Californian study, images taken by one girl of a kitten were not just sentimental portraits, but a record of her family moving house and community, and the associated loneliness from the loss of friends that that involved. In Somerset, a mundane image of two sports bags overflowing with clothes actually proved to be a portrait of one teenager's life being divided between her divorced parents' separate homes.

But in what ways might these images be said to differ from what adults see around them or how they comprehend the social worlds that young people navigate on a daily basis?

For Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, it is clear that many of the things adults see as important hold very little meaning for children. When visiting the local communities of the children in her study, she took photographs of the things that struck her. But, she says, "Some of the things that I found unique or beautiful, the kids would say, 'Oh yeah, that's just normal, we see that every day.'"

In Somerset, the young people sharing their photos in order to compile a visual account of what matters to them concluded that almost everything they had photographed was to do with the effect of economic circumstances on their social relationships and leisure lives. This led to longer conversations about the role of adults in teenagers' lives, as well as about the provision of affordable amenities and transport for young people living in rural areas.

The value of a photograph taken by a young person is rarely only in its superficial or aesthetic features. Rather, the young people both in California and Somerset were able to create visual accounts of their social interactions and of their uses of their local environments that ran counter to either media stereotypes or widespread adult assumptions.

By utilising children's photography, educators and researchers are able to allow children to teach them. By making visible children's knowledge, not only is the medium useful for understanding them, it is also useful for stretching and strengthening their understandings and their perspectives on the world.

Links and notes

The Chrisi Bailey Awards: www.thechrisibaileyaward.org.uk/frameset/index.htm

For more information on Marisol Clark-Ibáñez's work:
Clark-Ibáñez, Marisol (2004). Framing the social world with photo-elicitation interviews. American Behavioral Scientist, 47(12), 1507-1527