The recording from last year’s conversation between the Children’s Photography Archive’s Director, Melissa Nolas, and the co-founder of the Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation and then Director of Prism, Gayatri Nair, is now available on YouTube.

The conversation took place at the Goethe-Institut Chennai on Sunday 19 January 2025 as part of the Chennai Photo Biennale Fourth Edition.

In the video, you can catch Melissa’s presentation of children’s vernacular photography as that emerged out of a longitudinal study that gave children cameras to record the things that moved and mattered to them. Following this short presentation, Melissa and Gayatri discussed different aspects of children’s photography, the tensions between teaching children photography and leaving them to their own devices with a camera, and what educators can learn from researchers and vice versa.

We thank all colleagues at the Chennai Photo Biennale for making and sharing the recording. There is a brilliant archive off all the talks given during the CPB Fourth Edition which you can catch up on here.

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On Lampshades & Other Random Stuff: How to Read a Child’s Photograph

What happens when our toddlers and small children usurp our camera phones? Do we keep the myriad images of seemingly ‘random stuff’ or do we swip past and delete them? In this talk, director of the Children’s Photography Archive and visual sociologist Melissa Nolas explores the world of camera wielding children as that was shared with her by seven year olds in her research. She argues that far from ‘random stuff’ the things that children photograph in their everyday life, while sometimes perplexing to the grown-ups around them ,reveal much about their gaze onto the world, and what moves and matters to them in their everyday lives.

https://childphotoarchive.org/resources/childrens-photography/ 

The time has come: today we open the much awaited exhibition ‘What Makes Me Click!’ part of the Chennai Photo Biennale. Opening at 3.30pm at the Government Museum, Egmore Chennai the exhibition features over 200 images made by children, some as young as three, from 15 projects from around the world which have been working with children and photography, in some cases, for over 30 years.

The exhibition co-curated by the Prism at Chennai Photo Biennale and the Children’s Photography Archive, celebrates children’s artistic, documentary, experimental, and vernacular [everyday] photography. What makes the children featured in the exhibition click is manifold. Their subjects are as varied as their locations and the photographic genres they employ. Photographs included depict scenes from children and young people’s everyday life and family, their local communities and schools, places and landscapes, their cities and country sides, the worlds of adult professionals and children themselves. The images have been made using film and digital photography, old school methods such as cyanotypes and the pinhole camera, as well as (D)SLRs and point-and-shoot, and disposable cameras.

Through a curatorial process that foregrounded the child’s gaze, we come to see the world through child and young people’s eyes and lenses. Taken together the photographs convey children’s strong sense of place – whether that’s Chennai, Gaza, or Guatemala City, a curiosity about themselves and those around them, and an appetite for experimentation. Many of the photographs show children taking pleasure in the medium, playing with colour and composition, and demonstrating a level of skill that is a testament to the photographers’ many collaborations, with their subjects, their cameras, and with the adults in their lives encouraging and supporting them to make images.

The photographs demonstrate the medium’s breadth as a mode of expression and communication and children’s and professionals’ enduring love for it across art, education, community work, and research.

Notes:

The image on our flyer comes from the exhibited project Eyes on Gaza by Ibn Rushd Fund & Qattan Child Centre Gaza. You can access an overview of the featured projects on the CPB Foundation website. For more information about the exhibition or each of our organisations you can contact melissa@childphotoarchive.org and gayatri@chennaiphotobiennale.

The Children’s Photography Archive (CPA) is absolutely delighted to be co-curating a showcase of children’s photographs from around the world for Edition IV of the Chennai Photo Biennale.

Melissa Nolas, Director of CPA, and Gayatri Nair, Director of Prism, the CPB’s educational arm, have been working closely together since July to bring together a selection of images made by children in 20 different photography projects across the world.

We think of children who take photographs as ‘budding artists’, ‘photographers in the making’, and usually (even if subconsciously) wait until they become adults before we call them photographers.

Now more than ever, children around the world are engaged in photography. Some are of random objects, some are of homes, people and animals, and some are of nothing in particular at all – and each of them are taken by children while learning, playing, and experimenting with photography.

This exhibition is our attempt to bring the child’s voice to the forefront. What do children see? What do they value? What is important enough to them to photograph?

We do this in the hope that we all see children as humans with agency, with their own thoughts and opinions and put them in the centre of dialogues about identity, inclusivity and representation.

The exhibitions will feature images made by children as young as four and cover a range of photographic genres from the vernacular to documentary and artistic.

See a preview of the projects online and join us in Chennai from January 17 (Opening) until March 16, 2025 at the Government Museum.

• Correction: due to circumstances beyond our control the exhibition opening is now scheduled for January 23 at 3.30pm. The location remains the same: Egmore Government Museum.

Call for Participation in the Children’s Photo Biennale, Chennai

We are delighted to announce that we have partnered with Chennai Photo Biennale’s Arts Education team Prism to co-curate the Children’s Photo Biennale Edition IV which opens in December 2024 and runs until March 2025 in Chennai, India.

The aim of the Children’s Photo Biennale exhibition is to spotlight children’s photography on a variety of subjects from around the world and our theme is ‘What Makes Me Click!’.

We invite artists, educators, and organisations working with children and photography to submit photographs by children that showcase what children photograph and why. Entry is free.

What we need: (1) 5-10 photographs in high quality jpeg format from a relevant project or practice; (2) any explanatory text about the project/practice they come from, and any relevant text about each photograph and its child photographer (anonymous is fine, if that is the arrangements you have with the children and their parents/carers); (3) a declaration via email from the responsible person submitting that you are happy for us to exhibit these photographs for the purposes of the Biennale including possible post-production artefacts).

Deadline for submissions: September 15th, 2024.

The format of the exhibition is currently funding dependent. At a minimum, we are planning for an online exhibition, although ideally we would aim for a hybrid exhibition (online and in person), with a series of related events (workshops and speakers) as well as a small zine / mini catalog. All artists/organisations submitting have the option to also archive the photographs with the Children’s Photography Archive C.I.C..

For further details please email: Melissa Nolas at childrensphotographyarchive [at ] gmail.com and Gayatri Nair gayatri [at] chennaiphotobiennale.com.

Photographs in the CPA are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. If you do use this work please drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you.

We are super excited to announce that we will be co-organising a three-part seminar series on childhood publics and the child’s gaze. The seminar series is part of the Sociological Review Seminar Series and has been funded by the Sociological Review Foundation.

With the advent of smartphones, tablets and digital cameras, children are taking more and more photos – and what happens to these images? This series of three events aims to creatively reimagine the archival, aesthetic, ethical, legal and technical affordances of children’s photography for research and practice, bringing our understanding and practice of children’s photography into the 21st century.

To this end, these three thematically linked seminars explore the infrastructures for the child’s gaze from a theoretical, methodological, and ethical perspective. Our series will open with the first seminar dedicated to the unpacking of how the image of the child is constructed throughout history in the public sphere, and in particular the press and other media outlets. Taking the images of childhood as an entry point into the notion of the ‘gaze’, in our second seminar we will move to explore children’s gazes onto the world and the issues involved in making those gazes public. The third seminar will be brings the series full circle through an explicit focus on the ethics and infrastructures for the child’s gaze.

These three in-person day-long events will be held in April, May and June 2023 at Goldsmiths, University of London. Morning sessions will be open to academics, students, and the general public; afternoon workshops will be reserved for academics and students, with priority given to doctoral and early career researchers and research in practice not linked to the academy. Further details about the events and instructions for booking will be live by 1 February on the Childhood Publics Research Programme events page.

The seminar series is organised by Sevasti-Melissa Nolas, Brenda Herbert, Zoe Walshe (all Goldsmiths, University of London) and Elina Moraitopoulou (Hamburg University/Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Please join us for the launch of the Children’s Photography Archive (childphotoarchive.org), a unique born-digital archive dedicated to the celebration and preservation of children’s photography and to pushing the boundaries of understanding of children’s visual cultures. 

The launch takes place online on Thursday 15 September at 3pm GMT. 

As well as an introduction from the team behind the Children’s Photography Archive, speakers include:

• Dr Barbara Turk Niskač, Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University
• Dr Verónica Policarpo, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa
• Elina Moraitopoulou, Hamburg University/Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
• Professor Rebecca Coleman, Bristol University 

Please book your place here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-launch-of-the-childrens-photography-archive-cic-tickets-395833156627

Zoom link will to be circulated to those registered before the event.