Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

Children’s cultural production is rarely taken seriously. In the visual arts, children’s drawing and painting has been celebrated by modern artists seeking a primitivist, untutored source of authentic expression, but children’s photography has not been offered the same status. If children’s photography is considered at all, it may be thought to be an incompetent practice, with out-of-focus subjects, beheaded sitters, and fingers protruding in front of the lens. For example, I have collected over 100 books of photographic guidance for children, spanning over 100 years, and every one of them contains a section on mistakes. The assumption tends to be that there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way of doing photography. With books of children’s guidance, that sense of right and wrong is also moral direction. Books of instruction are often behavioural regulations, where adults seek to mould pliable children. These adult-produced sources offer a photographic view into what has been expected of children historically.

The period covered in the book not only charts a time, from the late nineteenth century to the early 2000s, when photographic technology changed fundamentally, but also an era when attitudes to children shifted dramatically. At the start of the book, those who received an education into their teenage years were a rare minority: children were mostly wage-earners before they hit adolescence. They were de facto adults and were expected to behave and communicate as such, demonstrating maturity and responsibility. In the 1950s and 1960s, attitudes to young people were reconfigured: youth attitudes were seen as shaping forces on the wider culture and thus worth paying attention to as a refreshing source of new viewpoints. The young might teach the old new ways of being. By the end of the twentieth century, I found an increasing infantilisation of children, whose capabilities seem strikingly diminished and whose vulnerabilities are prioritised. I use photography as a lens to interpret these changes. The various sources that I assemble and analyse, from school archives to public competitions, advertising and instruction manuals, sociological experiments to art exhibitions, show not only how children see, but how they are seen. Children’s media experience is never unadulterated.

The camera has always been a moral device where children were concerned, for good or for ill, because childhood is a moral concept as a temporary state that embodies hope for the future and anxieties about the passage of time. Children are perceived to be uniquely impressionable, and variously in need of protection or improvement, whether they are perceived to be threatened or perceived to be a threat. Across its history, in the case studies I detail in the book, photography was repeatedly claimed to make things better for children: it developed social skills in clubs; it kept the wayward off the streets; it expanded narrow horizons. I examine how this played out in practice through children’s own words and pictures.

Researchers who put children at the centre of their studies argue that young people are more than apprentice adults: they inhabit distinctive worlds with distinctive perspectives. The camera shows this literally but never transparently. Photos may look realistic, but they are always selective visions, shaped by the camera’s capacities and by cultural conditions. Children produce photos within historical limitations shaped by uneven access to apparatus, films, developing and printing, and by what was permitted or promoted by adults, and by wider structures of leisure and commerce. As with all cultural production, children’s experience is enabled and restricted by economics, education, gender, class, ethnicity and physical ability. There are fundamental differences, too, between older and younger children, and between what is expected of, and produced by, two-year-olds and 17-year-olds. Consequently, the child worlds that we see are subject to all these forces.

Ongoing thread. More from Annebella Pollen to follow.