Can you share the inspiration behind creating a born-digital archive for children's photography? How has your academic background influenced and supported this initiative?

I love telling the origin story of the Children’s Photography Archive! Between 2014 and 2019, I led a large, international research project funded by the European Research Council exploring children’s encounters, experiences, and engagement in public life. We worked with the same 45 children over a three-year period (the children were six when we first met them) using a range of creative methods, a key one of which was photography. We asked them to make photographs of the things that moved and mattered to them in their everyday lives – you can see a selection of these photographs in the ‘Connectors Study’ collection in the archive.

At some point towards the end of this project, in Spring 2018, my colleague and CPA co-founder, Christos Varvantakis and I were writing a short article about ‘child photographers’, and in working out what we were going to write, we wondered whether there might be any archives or collections of children’s photographs that we could look at ourselves and then refer readers to. We searched high and low, and asked colleagues in the archival and photographic communities in three different countries, but we came to a dead end. This felt like a real shame and complete omission: photography is used widely in research with children, in formal and informal educational settings, and in competitions; and these days with ready access to digital cameras or cameras on tablets and phones, it was mindboggling that even some of these images were not preserved.

At some point in these conversations, it dawned on me that we were ‘sitting’ on approximately 4,500 digital photographs taken by the children in our study, and if an archive of children’s photography didn’t exist, well, we should just invent it! So, and as is often the case in creative collaborations, one thing led to another, we were lucky enough to get follow-on funding for my initial grant (an ERC Proof of Concept) and this enabled us to set up the Children’s Photography Archive in July 2021.

My academic background has influenced the Children’s Photography Archive project in several ways. I’ve been doing research on one aspect or another of participation for over twenty years and as such, one aspect or another of participation is at the heart of the archive whether that is its curatorial approach or its ethics; we are still a young organisation and there is much more to do on this front, but the child’s gaze is a central guiding principle underpinning our work. The other influence is my research background in visual and multimodal research where I have worked with children and young people using video, photography, and drawings as a medium of communication and self/collective expression, and I know how powerful images and text can be in telling stories of everyday lives and lived experiences on a range of topics. At one point in my career, I also co-founded and co-edited a journal for visual and multimodal research (Entanglements: Experiments in Multimodal Ethnography) and this has helped me to think – together with many other colleagues – about what to do with these images, what sense to make of them, how to curate them, where and with the support of what technology. 

One final thing that links my academic background and the work I’m currently doing as Director of the CPA is a longstanding commitment to a conceptual lens that foregrounds everyday life, the mundane, the ordinary, affect, and culture, themes that overlap nicely with vernacular photography. While I know that photography in childhood often happens in organised spaces, what I’m passionate about is discovering photographs made by children in their everyday lives, whether that’s with family and friends, on their own in their bedrooms or on the street or the back yard, those photographs shot out of a child’s own curiosity to explore and experiment with this medium and to discover the world around them through the lens of a camera. This is how it started for me many moons ago, on a balcony in 1980s Athens during a heatwave summer (when that was more of an exceptional event), and I am currently running a small research project to find others who took up a camera early on in life. 

What methodology do you use for discovering and curating the photographs? Have any ethical concerns emerged since the project started?

At present, our main methodology for discovering photographs is outreach and collaboration with universities, schools, informal learning spaces, festivals, etc. I know that photography is widely used in research contexts with children, as well as in schools and youth groups and leisure contexts, and of course, in competitions. As such, we have been working with researchers (initially, given that that is the context the CPA originally came from) to support the ethical conversion of photographs taken for research purposes into photographs that can be archived and shown more broadly, and we have developed a protocol for this ‘translation’.

More recently, I have been collaborating with Prism, the Chennai Photo Biennale’s educational division. Prism, directed by Gayatri Nair, does some wonderful work with children in schools in Chennai and surrounding areas, using photography as a medium of self-expression and documentation, and inspiringly I think, also includes the children’s photographs in their Biennales. The fourth edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale focuses on why we take photographs, and we are looking for submissions of children’s photographs from artists, schools, and other relevant organisations working with children. There is also the option to submit these photographs to the CPA after the exhibition. Plans moving forward include outreach and collaboration with photographic competitions to provide an archival repository for children and young people’s images, as well as reaching out to artists, educators, youth workers, and play workers and the organisations that support them/employ them to offer a home for children’s photographs. 

In terms of our curatorial policy, the child’s gaze is central, in a very material way. If you look at the way the collections are organized, you will see that you can browse the archive in terms of ‘photo contents’. The categories emerged directly from the original study I mentioned earlier and the children’s photographic subjects: if you recall the starting point was ‘take photographs of things that matter to you’.  Animals, Arts and Culture, Games and Toys, Nature, People and Dress, Places, Technologies, and Thoughts and Beliefs – these are the sorts of subjects that came up in the 4500 children’s photographs and the three-year ethnography that gave rise to the photographs. So, it’s not just what children showed with their photographs that mattered to them but also what they told us in general and in particular as they reflected on their photographs and their everyday lives over a three-year period.

As an archival strategy and curatorial methodology, this is an inversion of the typical order of things where it is an institution (in the case of an archive) or individual curator who is responsible for articulating an (informed/researched) vision for an exhibition or other presentation of a collection or collections. It is an approach to curation that is deeply collaborative from the get-go, a sensibility to photography that has a long history in participatory projects for social change, and one that is becoming more prominent thanks to recent publications in the history of photography,  as well as visual sociology with children and young people, which is truly wonderful to see. The only deviation to all of this is the category of ‘food’ – we included this because there were a surprising number of children’s photographs on food or food themes (e.g., preparation and consumption inside and outside the house) but this was not a theme that children themselves reflexively spoke about (the child-parent-food configuration often being a known zone of conflict in everyday family life!) but it was central to our ethnographic experience and figured prominently enough to create a theme in the photographs. The ‘emergent category’ is also key to curatorial thinking, and it allows for new categories to emerge. Childhood, children’s interests, and what they photograph, we speculate, are dynamic. They remain the same and change over time, and an emergent category allows us to capture this dynamic relationship as expressed in children’s photography.

Finally, also very important to our curatorial approach is contextualisation. What this means is that we want to know the story behind or alongside the photograph as much as possible. This might be a personal story, a project story, an event story, etc. It is so easy to impose an interpretation on another’s photograph, which is fine up to a point, but it is so much more interesting to enter a conversation with the photographer and their image. This is what contextualisation attempts to do. A formative influence for me here is the work of the late visual anthropologist Marcus Banks who emphasised that photography (but also film and art) is ‘the product of human action’ that is ‘entangled to varying degrees in human social relations’, and his insistence to pay attention to both the internal and external narratives that an image produces and especially where the two meet. 

There are a number of ethical considerations with the CPA and ethics has been designed into everything from the outset. In fact, we spent two years working on our values and ethics, both in terms of a statement, and also as a set of working practices. The key for me here is the balancing of children’s rights to protection, participation, and provision (of services). The creation of the archival infrastructure itself is provision – there wasn’t something in place before for the preservation of children’s photographs. Participation is covered largely by the curatorial approach described above, although there is more to do here in terms of a children’s advisory group and working more directly with children and young people. In terms of protection, there is a moderation policy in place, and the key thing here is things like parental consent for children’s photographs where they are not able to consent for themselves, but also third-party consents, and the right to withdraw photographs from the archive.

What’s interesting for me is that a number of the ethical issues that probably immediately come to mind when we put children and photography together (e.g., exploitation) evaporate when the child is behind the camera and for me this is a clear example of participation becoming protection for the child. This doesn’t mean that children themselves won’t reproduce histories of unethical practice in photography, and in our values and ethics, as well as the child’s gaze and contextualisation, we talk about ‘respectful photography’ and encourage children and those who work with them to think about what it means to take another’s image. The main ethical challenge then becomes whether a child can be named as a creator of their photograph as per photographic conventions and as many children want; we negotiate this on an individual basis and often find ways to do so without revealing a minor’s full identity.

Finally, from our perspective and responsibilities as an archive of children’s photography, the final ethical principle is intersectionality and that has to do with being mindful of which children’s photographs are submitted and represented in the archive, knowing that photography, certainly past but also present, will have its own socio-economic, gender, class, racial and ethnic dynamics as relevant to the context of production, and striving to balance omissions through further outreach. 

In what ways do digital photographs of children differ from those taken during the analogue era? Have children become more adept at visually articulating their ideas in the digital age?

This is such a brilliant question, and we are so far away from being able to answer it right now! Children’s photography is a vastly under-researched area. We know from recent research that children have been an imagined audience for camera manufacturers and popular magazines but given the status of vernacular photography (compared to commercial or fine art photography), and family photography as a sub-category of that and children’s photography as a further sub-category, children’s photographs have not been valued and are not preserved outside personal archiving strategies. So, we just don’t have the photographs en masse to be able to make meaningful comparisons across analogue and digital eras.

Completely anecdotally at this point, we might say that some of the subject matter has remained the same (pets, family members, friends, important events). Also, anecdotally, we might say that it is possible to detect a certain playfulness in children’s images whether analogue or digital, before they are introduced to photographic rules either through formal training or their own trial and error. I think it is fair to say that the big change is access to photography. Digital devices all have cameras on them, and children now have a lot more access to these digital devices-cameras than they would have done in the past, both devices and digital cameras are relatively more affordable than their analogue counterparts and the practice of developing photographs is far cheaper – we either don’t print photographs any more or print a selected number. I think it is also fair to say that as societies we are much more image-savvy than we used to be, and children grow up in visual cultures which they are also very adept at deciphering – sometimes more than adults! Beyond that, I hope that I might be able to say a bit more with the Hide and Seek project… 

How would you describe the unique characteristics of the children's perspective/gaze in their photographs?

I have written about the child’s gaze as being playful which seems like a completely banal thing to say but for me, it’s what you do with that playfulness: do you take it seriously or do you dismiss it as childish? If we take it seriously then we can engage with it as an idiom of childhood – a mode of expression and communication – which has the capacity to tell us a lot about how children see the world and the interventions they make into their worlds, sometimes with a camera too! I am thinking about the specific example we used in this article which was one of many in which the camera was used to disrupt family dynamics, to transgress boundaries set down by parents and other adults in authority or indeed older siblings, or to use the camera for the sheer joy of being a trickster and winding up those around them. In terms of the photographs themselves, I tend to describe children’s photographs as unruly or undisciplined. There will typically be something askew about the image: an irreverence for the rule of thirds perhaps, ‘randomness’ by which I mean an angle or subject matter that as an adult I would typically not give a second thought to, or blurry images that aren’t automatically disregarded, or an unclear subject.

There is also a considerable amount of repetition – we haven’t included repetitions in the archive but we had many of these in the context of the visual ethnography, taking the same image over, and over, and over again (if you are reading this as a parent of a young child you will probably recognise this characteristic of children’s photography from when your own child ‘borrows’ your phone to take photos). Children generally appreciate repetition, it gives a sense of regularity and security, but I think this form of repetition with the photos is experimental too (will this thing I’m looking at be the same with the next click?) and possibly a way of filling time, at least these are my thoughts right now. I love all these qualities in children’s photographs because they make children’s photography provisional, open to experimentation, dialogue, and to imagination, and they eschew perfection. I think that, if we can bare this, we can learn a lot from it. I know I have.  

On your website, users can filter images by the gender of the child who took them. What differences have you observed between the photographs taken by girls and those taken by boys?

I was initially stumped by this question because while it is possible to filter by gender this was a design feature that was translated over from the study as opposed to being because we had picked up any significant differences and I haven’t looked at this yet in a huge amount of detail – not because it’s not important but because there were a million and one considerations that went into the design of the CPA and which keep me up more at night! Also, given the subject of the original study from which the CPA was derived, much of my thinking has been shaped by finding ‘in common’ characteristics across a disparate and diverse set of children and their images. 

That said, I have looked at the photos again through the gender filter, and I would advise that any differences should be read as a reflection of gender differences already in children’s lives as opposed to differences in photographic styles (there might be and anyone who wants to dig into this is very welcome, just don’t forget to acknowledge the CPA!). So, for example, all the children took photographs of popular culture (books, cartoon shows, toys, diaries, films, events, etc) but the sorts of things that girls gravitated towards in popular culture were sometimes different from what boys consumed and it is these differences that were reflected in the photographs. And there are always surprises: one girl in London strongly rejected conformist views of gender and communicated this in her choice of favourite play and her photographs of that play/toys. I guess that, without that knowledge, it would be easy to misgender her dragon photographs as belonging to the gaze of a boy.

Sometimes gender is also not the best explanatory variable for the photographs at the younger, more dependent age. For example, all the children took photographs of important people in their lives (not in the archive): mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, friends, etc, where age is more important in understanding those photographs than is gender. This is why contextualisation is really important.

Is there a particular stage in a child's or young person's development when they begin to take images with more awareness of themes and visual characteristics? How do their forming identity and self-consciousness affect their skills as image-makers? 

From my experience of working with children, young people, and photography/video, I think this varies considerably and might not necessarily have to do with any ideas of child development and stages of that (a predominant way of thinking about children and young people which I am not sure is entirely helpful here). I think awareness of themes and visual characteristics comes from the relational, social, and cultural context of the child and has less to do with their biological age. So, for instance, in my own research, we explicitly and from the outset explained to the six-year-olds we worked with that the study was about encounters, experiences, and engagement with public life which we translated as being the things that matter to people and that might lead them to act.

This was our reflexive context as a research project and children, with the support of their parents in some cases, took this on board and made relevant photographs: protests marches, football matches, endangered animals, nature and the environment, but also their loved ones, friends and family and their prized possessions. Many of these photographs were highly reflexive and self-aware. But we provided that space for this to happen, and this is what a lot of photographic projects working with children do. At the same time, children start forming their identities from the moment they are born and within that space, a number of the children also used the cameras we provided on the project to practice photography for self-expression: I’m thinking of one London boy who returned a ton of selfies of himself exploring his face and his expressions, and two London sisters who dressed up in their mother’s jewellery and red lipstick and used selfies to see what they looked like – neither of these sets of photographs are in the archive because they would identify the children.