Children as Photographers

From Lewis Hines’s campaign photography on child labour in the early 1900s to Dorothea Lange’s portraits of the Great Depression, Steve McCurry’s portrait of 12-year-old Sharbat Gula, the ‘Afghan Girl’ in the mid-1980s, and Sally [Page 407]Mann’s controversial ‘Immediate Family’, children have been the subject of much public photographic practice. Child and family portraiture is also a recognised genre of photography which emerged with urbanisation, industrialisation, and the rise of the middle classes. School photographs are a further familiar mode of documenting childhood, and children’s images are used the world over to sell products and raise money for charitable causes.

It is fair to assume that, historically and internationally, children themselves have also been producing a considerable body of photographic images, through practices of family photography ...