Children Framing Childhoods

About the Website

This website features digital resources to encourage different ways of engaging with the young people’s images.  It includes photographs printed in each chapter of the book, a selection of photographs of the kids’ homeplaces and special objects and an example of one individual child’s photographs spanning across time. I encourage people to view the photographic galleries on the website before they read the book, to let their eyes be drawn to what grabs their attention and to ask themselves why this might be.

It also includes five videos that I created in collaboration with others. As the project developed, I began to have ideas about how I could use more visual and creative means to express some of my ideas about the research.  These videos intentionally blur borders between research and art; analysis and evocation; looking and feeling; ethics and aesthetics; seeing and knowing. Each video is placed in relationship to a thematically related chapter, but each of them can also be viewed apart and out of sequence from those chapters.

My hope is that people will immerse themselves in the kids’ photographs and then read the book to gain a deeper understanding of the social contexts and conditions within which these photographs were created, as well as an appreciation for the layered meanings and intentions that the kids shared with me and with each other about their pictures. This movement between image and text invites readers/viewers to reflect on their ways of seeing while considering the interpretations I offer.

I am grateful to the kids for allowing me copyright ownership of their images so that they can be widely viewed. The photographs and videos on the website are licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows for free access and distribution as long as people abide by the conditions specified. These include the following: the work must be given attribution, must be used for noncommercial purposes, and no derivatives (for example, re-mixing and re-purposing) of the work can be made.