Parents and children participating in the world through photographs

Abstract

The title “Photo Mothers” refers to the situation that parents are nowadays facing when family life with children is one of continuous photo shooting, photo sending and photo sharing. Photography forms the material for children's lives and their way of participating in the world. Often the children perform for their cameras, but even more often the world performs for them, to be photographed and shared with their friends and parents. What does it mean to grow up with digital cameras and the new media, which give you a new kind of visibility from a very early age? Who is setting the rules of privacy for children presenting themselves on the web? The article focuses mainly on two different photographic practices, which — at least in Finland — affect many families with children below the Facebook age limit: mobile photo messages and the web gallery and a photo-sharing site called IRC Gallery. The experiences of the author and other mothers are placed in the framework of recent research on mobile photo messages as a special case of immediacy in photography.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article is published as “‘Photomothers’: Send and Share”.

I have had the pleasure of sharing my experiences with my colleagues at the Finnish Museum of Photography, and especially with museum director Elina Heikka. She also generously gave me permission to use some personal images, as well her analysis of her experiences of the virtual life of her teenage daughters in web galleries.

Notes

1 Päivi Setälä, whose doctoral dissertation deals with the photographs taken by children and the photographical expressions in children's photographs, points out that even the most experimental child can be the most conventional spectator of her/his own photographs (239–40).

2 Ficora (Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority ) Market Review 5/2012 — Changes in Consumer Prices 2011, Ficora (Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority ) Market Review 6/2012 — Broadband and Telephone Services, Statistical review January to June 2012.

3 See also the concepts of “distant closeness” (Van House) and “intimate visual co-presence” (Okabe and Ito).

4 IRC Gallery was originally developed for the people who chatted on the channels of IRC (Internet Relay System) and wanted to see each other's faces. At its best, IRC Gallery was among the ten most popular websites in Finland. Between 2006 and 2008 it had more than half a million registered users and more than 800,000 weekly visitors. By December 2011 the news reported that ICR Gallery had lost lot of its users to Facebook, which was now considered to be the main social networking service. Although the amount of registered members of IRC Gallery has decreased, the site is still undeniably an integral part of Finnish contemporary youth culture.