‘A camera is a big responsibility’: a lens for analysing children's visual voices

Abstract

This article is based on longitudinal image-based research conducted with working-class immigrant boys and girls in a US public school context. Picture taking is one part of a larger ethnographic exploration of how the children perceive and navigate linguistic, cultural, race/ethnic and economic differences, family-school relationships, and self and identity changes over time. The article discusses a mode of visual research and analysis the author has adopted which is dynamic and relational; it resists any single orientation to children's photography – whether as an aesthetic experience, a socio-cultural activity or a cognitive-developmental process, to name three common perspectives. Instead, her goal is to create a ‘need-to-know-more’ stance towards children as knowing subjects and to appreciate the limits of what we can see, know and understand about their childhood contexts, individual subjectivities and exercise of multiple voices.

Notes

[1] See Wagner (1999) for his introduction to a special issue dedicated to how childhood is seen by children that set the stage for much of the research in this field.

[2] See Arnot and Reay (2007) for their excellent review and critique of ‘voice research’ in which they call for an alternative notion of student voice based on the work of Basil Bernstein. These authors focus on sociological voice research not psychological research which this study seeks to combine. Also see Piper and Frankham (2007).

[3] The ethnography included classroom observations, informal interviews with school personnel, and participant observation in various school activities. The children were followed from fifth grade through the end of sixth grade. All names are pseudonyms.

[4] I first took this approach in my image-based ethnographic study of how low-income, mostly African-American pregnant girls experience ‘teenage pregnancy’ – a phenomenon and stigmatising label they were keenly aware of and navigated within the multiple contexts of family, school and community (Luttrell 2003).

[5] ‘Controlling images’ is Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) term; her work focuses on the objectification and control of the sexuality of Black men and women. Her theory about controlling images can be extended to any number of intersecting systems of oppression that objectify individuals (in this case children) and rob them of their dignity and humanity.

[6] In 2006 and 2007 I helped organise two conferences, funded by Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, entitled Visible Rights: Photography By and For Children, to build links between youth civic engagement, social activism and the visual arts. These conferences brought together artists, educators, child rights advocates and scholars from North and South America to explore the role that photography can play in facilitating children's agency and promoting their rights. My participation in these conferences opened up myriad questions about the role of photography in fostering children's rights, participation and control over representing themselves. http://www.culturalagents.org/int/visible.html; http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/brazil/events/visible_rights; http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/brazil/events/visible_rights07.

[7] See Pat Thomson (2008, 4–6) for her discussion/critique of ‘voice’ research and its tendency to universalise the experience of children and youth. She reviews five different kinds of voice to which researchers have paid attention – authoritative, critical, therapeutic, consumer and pedagogic – and suggests there may be more. She also breaks down two different types of approach to visual research – those in which researchers use visual methods on children (where children are framed as the subjects of inquiry), and those that use visual methods with children/youth as partners in inquiry.

[8] See Brown (1998) for an exemplary account that conceptualises voice in social and psychological ways.

[9] See Daiute and Nelson (1997) for discussion of children's narratives as insight into self, identity and social consciousness.

[10] See Briggs 1986; Bruner 1986; Mishler 1986; Chase 2003; Riessman 2008 for discussion of narrative as a meaning-making process.

[11] These are the labels and percentages provided by the school; they do not publish records of immigrant status of the children. Students are eligible for free and reduced lunch in schools if their family income is at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty line. In the United States the percentage of students in a school receiving free and reduced lunch is an indicator of the socio-economic status of a school.

[12] I am currently following up with participants in their senior year of high school, inviting them to look back on their images.

[13] A discussion about ethics and the dilemmas of consent in school-based projects is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is a topic well worth mentioning. See Morrow and Richards 1996; Thomas and O'Kane 1998; Valentine 1999; David, Edwards, and Alldred 2001; White et al. 2010.

[14] Here I shift to the pronoun we to include the many doctoral research assistants who participated in this process, including J. Poser (Poser 2007); interviewers E. Mishkin, M. Tieken, and C. Shalaby; and data analysts J. Broussard, S. Deckman, J. Dorsey and J. Hayden.

[15] See Gross, Katz, and Ruby (1988) for a discussion of visual ethics. We encouraged the children to practise (through role-playing) asking people for permission to photograph, and discussed with them why a person might want to say no, and how this also related to their own participation in the project. We also talked about photographs that they might decide they did not want to show, discuss or select for public viewing.

[16] We also brainstormed with the children and generated more specific prompts, including: ‘Take pictures of what learning is like at school’; ‘What makes you feel proud (of your school, family community)?’; ‘What is something that concerns you about your community?’; ‘Who or what do you admire?’; ‘Take pictures of places inside and outside of school where you feel comfortable’; ‘Take pictures of places inside and outside of school where you feel respect’; ‘Take pictures of places inside and outside of school where you feel like you belong’; ‘What do you do after school and on the weekends?’

[17] A full discussion of this pattern (and the one exception) are beyond the scope of this article.

[18] There are multiple ways to read the children's consumer culture pictures and dialogues (Cook 2004; Pugh 2009). White et al. (2010) found a similar finding in a photography project with immigrant children in Ireland.

[19] See Sharples et al. (2003) for a study of what children at different ages do with cameras in which they developed independent coding schemes for content and intention.

[20] These idioms include relative size; the feminine touch; function ranking; the (nuclear) family; and rituals of subordination (Goffman 1979).

[21] Thanks to this team, including J. Dorsey, J. Hayden, B. Malik, D. Saintil Previna, C. Shalaby, R. Rao, and E. Bright.

[22] See Thorne (2001) for her discussion of reading signs of care – across lines of social class, race and gender, and across cultural divides and child-rearing philosophies.

[23] Clark-Ibanez (2004) reports that it was common for the children in her study to take photographs of ‘big-ticket items’, and that the most common theme for why they photographed such items was so they would ‘have a memory of it in case it gets stolen or taken away’ (1521). The children in this study were more likely to explain how they or their family had come to acquire such items – in this case, computers, large-screen televisions, new sofas and ‘bedroom sets’ (e.g. ‘my grandmother got a new sofa so she gave us hers’; ‘I got this computer for Christmas’).

[24] Lareau (2003) argues that the middle-class ‘concerted cultivation’ approach to childrearing advantages children in school settings.

[25] See Hochschild (2003) about children as eavesdroppers and what they learn from parental negotiations about their care; and Romero (2001) about what children learn from being taken by their mothers to their jobs.

[26] See Riessman (2008, 12–13) for her discussion of the value of combining categorical and case-based analysis whenstudying individual agency and intention. I am indebted to her and to Elliott Mishler for helping me think through the arc of the analytic process in this study.

[27] This is Lutz and Collins’ (1993) phrase for talking about the production, circulation and interpretation of images in National Geographic that serve to both reflect and create western views of cultural difference and hierarchies in the service of imperial power and oppression.

[28] Miriam Hirsch (1997) discusses the ideological effects of family photographs: ‘… because the photograph gives the illusion of being a simple transcription of the real. A trace touched directly by the event it records, it has the effect of naturalising cultural practices and of disguising their stereotyped and coded characteristics. As photography immobilises the flow of family life into a series of snapshots, it perpetuates familial myths while seeming merely to record actual moments in family history’ (7).

[29] Discussion of these overlapping concerns in visual research is beyond the scope of the article, but see Prosser (2000) about the ‘moral maze’ of concerns in visual research (Gold 1989).