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.
__
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/