A fragmented picture: reflections on the photographic practices of young people

Abstract

Research on children and youth increasingly features young people's photographs and/or young people as photographers. While this suggests that quite a lot is known about young people's relationships to photographs and camera technologies, this is not the case. Following an overview of studies that engage with young photographers, this article demonstrates why still very little is known about young people's photographic practices – that is, the range of ways and media through which young people take, feature in, and use photographs. The author argues that this gap in knowledge needs to be addressed. Important aspects of childhood, youth and growing up, including identity, belonging and memory, are often experienced and/or expressed in part through photographs and photography.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank Carolyn Jackson for comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. The article focuses on young people under 18 years of age. It approaches childhood and youth as social constructions. The terms ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ have imprecise age limits. I use ‘childhood’ to refer to people under 16, and ‘youth’ for people 16–17 years.

2. By ‘feature in’, I am referring not to mass‐produced commercial photographs of young people, but to how young people are involved in the production of photographs of themselves, whether self‐portraits or photographs taken by family, friends, acquaintances and professional photographers.

3. Photography is also used in youth work, but this is beyond the scope of this article.

4. One exception to this is Chalfen and Murui 2001.

5. There are no published historical studies of young people's photographic practices in the UK. The historical examples discussed here are those I discovered whilst researching the history of women and smoking (see Tinkler 2006). Since writing this article I have begun research on the history of young people's photographic practices and undertaken a photo‐elicitation pilot study of young women's photograph collections from the 1950s and 1960s. Figures 2 and 3 are taken from this research.

6. A respondent in Milne's (2006) study referred to religious objections to photography amongst Muslims. Though there has been some debate about this in the Muslim community, the consensus seems to be that photographs are acceptable when used for non‐idolatry purposes. http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/SAtellite?pagename=IslamOnline‐English‐Ask_Sc.

7. Reference DPA 770/1, Documentary Photographic Archive, Greater Manchester County Record Office.

8. Reference DPA 1121/207.