Entangled photographers: Agents and actants in preschoolers’ photography talk

Abstract

Photographs taken by young children have engendered a growing amount of research across diverse academic disciplines. Photographs have been used as visual data for analysing for example children’s social relations and well-being. However, only a few studies have addressed the photographic practices of young children as means for them to explore, imagine and coexist with the surrounding world. In this article, I introduce a case study that draws on research from art education and sociology of childhood. The data were gathered in a photography workshop in a Finnish early childhood education and care centre, where fourteen preschoolers discussed their photographs inspired by contemporary Finnish art photography. In order to expose diverse human and material actors and their interactions in preschoolers’ photography talk, I applied Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory. Thus, preschoolers’ photography is seen as a practice of visual meaning-making wherein agency is distributed among several actors.