‘What makes me click!’ opens today

The image on our flyer comes from the exhibited project Eyes on Gaza by Ibn Rushd Fund & Qattan Child Centre Gaza.

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 [email protected] and gayatri@chennaiphotobiennale.

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