News Features & Releases
Visible Rights: Photography for and by Youth
by Jill Anderson
Posted: March 15, 2007
In 2003, Associate Professor Wendy Luttrell discovered the power that photography has in understanding immigrant children's schooling experiences, and is now a supporter of this powerful tool in advocating children's rights.
She recently traveled to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where she was co-organizer of Visible Rights: Photography for and by Youth, a conference designed to identify best practices among leading practitioners, artists, and scholars who use photography to promote children's agencies and civic participation. The conference -- which attracted over 50 people from around the world -- was sponsored by Harvard Graduate School of Education, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Centro Universitario SENAC, and the U.S. Consulate General Sao Paulo.
Q: How did this conference differ from other education events?
A: First, it was truly cross-disciplinary. We often talk about the benefits of multiple perspectives -- the value of tapping multiple intelligences, as one conference put it. But it is a lot harder to achieve that goal. Second, participants spoke multiple languages -- literally speaking (we had simultaneous translation which was crucial), and figuratively speaking in terms of our practice, the contexts within which we work, our motivations, and assumptions.
For example, some conference participants were using photography in school settings to enhance youth visual and written literacy skills, while others, like me, were using photography as a participatory research method; still others were training young people to become photographers, in some cases, providing them a means to earn a living. We all placed different emphasis on aesthetic considerations and faced different ethical dilemmas in our work, especially those of us who work with children living in precarious conditions. Mostly we wanted to exchange strategies for forging meaningful and ethical connections and collaborations with youth.
We also wanted to bring people together around the concept of "visible rights" which builds on the recent shift in how we conceive of youth's participation in civic life — a shift from seeing children as passive and vulnerable, to recognizing them as agents with their own right.We also wanted to bring people together around the concept of "visible rights" which builds on the recent shift in how we conceive of youth's participation in civic life — a shift from seeing children as passive and vulnerable, to recognizing them as agents with their own right. Ever since the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, there has been a debate in child's rights programming and advocacy about how to involve young people in meaningful ways. Photography is an ideal strategy for taking children's voices and visions more seriously. Adults working with children can learn a great deal from the kinds of photographs young people take.
Q: What can photography tell you about a child?
A: Photography can be a tool for youth to interpret their world and to express their concerns. Kids use the camera to communicate their likes and dislikes, to feature people, places, and things that matter to them in ways adults might otherwise be unaware. Seeing the images that kids produce can allow adults to enter young people's worlds in a new way. For example, I think about the photographs that were exhibited and how many of these featured the work that children do and the value they place on it — from kids picking garbage in Guatemala to washing dishes or child-minding in Worcester, Mass. Adults can improve their sense of what is meaningful to children, asking questions rather than making assumptions about what facilitates and what hinders their development. Similarly, through photography, young people can develop critical and interpretive skills, gaining confidence in their ability to make judgments about what makes a "good" photograph — not only in aesthetic terms, but also in terms deciding how they want to represent themselves and their lives to audiences, including policymakers who exercise control over children's welfare. Photography can also serve as a means to enter into communication — either with other youth -- as many of the photo-exchange projects represented at the conference illustrated -- or with elders within the community.
In my current research project, I have been using photography to learn more about how immigrant children adapt to their new surroundings. Photographs taken by the children open the door for them to frame their own stories — first, by crafting a visual space that is uniquely theirs at home or at school or in the community, and then to speak about what matters. So, for example, one child took a photo of a doll in her room because it reminds her of her grandmother in Puerto Rico whom she misses. Through speaking about her photograph, she stresses what she values about her home country, how she continues to maintain ties with family members in her home country, and the strength she gains from these connections. Hers is not a simple story of leaving a country behind, but a story of living between two worlds into which she invites her viewers.
Across the many different projects represented at the conference, photography served as a useful tool for accessing a child's "voice" in the broadest sense of the word, allowing for often neglected aspects of a child's agency and expertise about her own life.
Q: What impact does the camera have on students?
A: Young people are inundated by photographic images — on television, billboards, advertising, on the internet — and it is vital that they are able to be aware of the influence and power these images hold.
One of the motivations behind many of the photography projects represented at the conference was to offer kids an opportunity to challenge many of the negative stereotypes about youth, especially kids who live in poverty and are often portrayed in the media in oversimplified ways as either victims or villains. One theme that tied various photography projects together was the importance of granting young people social validation — exhibiting their work, providing financial resources, and forging connections with people with whom they might otherwise not come into contact. But most important, in my view, is that photography can enable kids to look back, confront and create new images that portray the complexity of their lives.
Photography is a prompt for dialogue among children about the gap between how they see themselves, how they think they are seen by others, and who they wish to become.Q: Is photography about changing how students see themselves or changing society perception?
A: It's both. Photography is a prompt for dialogue among children about the gap between how they see themselves, how they think they are seen by others, and who they wish to become. And because photographs are incredibly evocative and hold multiple meanings for different audiences, they serve as invaluable prompts for crossgenerational and crosscultural dialogues. When children take their own photographs and then debate with each other about what they see and why they see it that way, it opens the door to talk about issues that might not get discussed in school settings or among adults and youth. Photography forces us to talk about perspective, what is central and what is marginal, and how it need not necessarily be so. But photography itself doesn't accomplish this — it is the collaborative and participatory nature of adults working with and learning from kids that creates new perceptions.