CPB Prism newsletter - Edition 3, October 2023

We began this newsletter as a space where we could pour out all of our niche interests and share them with you uninhibited, and this edition is focused on one of the coolest things we’ve discovered all year: The Children’s Photography Archive!

Children, as the archive’s website begins by saying, ‘are often the subject of photographic practice, but rarely are they thought of as photographers in their own right.’ And it’s true – 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.

The CPA is dedicated to subverting this idea, emphasizing the ‘child’s gaze’ as a unique window into the way children relate with the world, and is the first archive of its kind featuring the works of child photographers!

The Archive is the unplanned outcome of a five-year study conducted by Dr. Sevasti-Melissa Nolas and Dr. Christos Varvantakis, researchers at Goldsmith University, on the relationship between childhood and public life. In their study, Melissa and Christos asked children to take photographs of anything that mattered to them, in return receiving photographs of ‘just about anything: animals and nature, places in their city, books they were reading, cartoons they watched, posters on their walls, relationships in their lives, their homes, photographs of themselves playing,’ etc. It’s a selection of these photographs, curated by the children themselves as well as by a research team, that forms the archive’s first collection.

We work with thousands and thousands of photographs every year. 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.

Discovering the Children’s Photography Archive led us to realize, for the first time, that someone else in the world was asking many of the same questions we struggle with ourselves: What can we do with the plethora of photographs in our archive? What’s the best way of sharing them with the world? How can we involve children, the creators of these photographs themselves, in curating these photographs and making decisions about them?

In July this year, Gayatri, Director of Education at Prism, had the opportunity to?discuss all of these questions over a seminar series with?Melissa and Christos in London!

At the seminar, titled ‘Childhood Publics and the Child’s Gaze’, Gayatri particularly highlighted the way the pressure we face to appease funders affects our curation of photographs for exhibitions, bringing to light an instance when a funder refused to fund an upcoming exhibition because they were disappointed at the ‘aesthetics’ of the images taken by children.

As a non-profit organization, how do we ensure that we don’t let our exhibitions get affected by the way adults see? As Melissa and Christos note, the child’s gaze is ‘a gaze which offers a playfully askew view on the world, whether that’s found in the movement and blurriness of an image, or the slightly ‘odd’ choice of photographic subject and the ‘off’ angle of the photograph.’

How do we prevent mainstream ideas of aesthetics, beauty and composition from affecting the work of child photographers?

At Prism, we are continually changed in our understanding of the world of children each time we gain a glimpse into their everyday lives through their photographs, and working to ensure that we uphold every child we work with as a photographer in their own right, with perspectives that can inform us about children’s lives like no one else can, is of the greatest possible importance to us.?

We are thrilled to be able to engage with the Children’s Photography Archive on designing better approaches to working with child photographers and our archives of their work!

On a newsletter dedicated to child photographers, we’re delighted to introduce you to the work of some of the photographers we’ve been working with at Ramana Vidyalaya, a school in Sholinganallur!

Our students at Ramana Vidyalaya are participating in a 20-week basic photography program. During every class, students shoot within the school campus, with the school’s playground, greenery, activities going on within classrooms, students and teachers, and the abundance of shadows, patterns, and the many different colored walls of the school as their subjects. We’re constantly amazed by the tremendous growth the students have shown as photographers over the classes, and at the wildly different subjects, angles, perspectives, and ways of looking they’ve come up with – despite shooting within the exact same space every class!

Find some of their photographs below.

Looking at Colors

Angles and Perspectives

Frames within Frames

Portraits

Reflections

We’re excited to announce that we’ve signed an MoU with the Greater Chennai Corporation to carry out our basic photography program in 4 schools this year!

We will be able to reach 200 children through these schools, and a training program for the educators who will be conducting each of these workshops has already begun at the CPB Lighthouse.

We can't wait to begin!

We would love to hear from you!

What did you think about this newsletter? What would you like to see more of? Reach out to us at [email protected] and let us know.