Shifting the focus: children's image-making practices and their implications for analysis

Abstract

This paper provides analytic focus on the productive and editorial contexts of children and young people's image-making, making visible its implications for the analysis of photographs. Drawing on participatory research in which children and young people worked alongside researchers to create a visual narrative of their lived experiences of neighbourhood, the paper suggests that greater attention to children's image-making practices brings an important dimension to the interpretative challenges generated by the visual. Through a focus on image-making and its productive and editorial contexts, the paper shifts the analytic focus away from the image as a site of meaning-making to encompass the ways in which photographs acquire multiple meanings through the lived experience of their creators.

Keywords:

• childhood
• visual methods
• interpretation
• context
• production
• creative process

Notes

These photographs are selected in order to give a sense of the range of images produced whilst being mindful of the need to protect the identities of the participants. For a useful discussion of the ethical implications of visual research with children and young people see Wiles et al. 2010.

All names are pseudonyms.

‘Estate’ is a pseudonym.

These images are not included here as they would identify the children.