‘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.