Photographic Agency and Agency of Photographs: Three-year-olds and Digital Cameras

This article contains some of the results from a recently completed small-scale qualitative research study with a focus on three-year-olds and digital cameras in preschool. The aim of the study was to give children access to the agency of being camera users. The study is based on two assumptions: that photographic documentation of young children’s learning and their development is an essential feature in Swedish preschools, and that it´s almost always the teachers who use the camera devices. The results show - with the help of a new materialistic theoretical framework (Barad, 2003, 2007, 2014; Lenz Taguchi, 2010) - that children, together with the cameras, illustrate changed power relations when it comes to who is looking at whom, and that they make visible new and changed photographic aspects of daily activities in preschool.

"[T]he results of the analyses presented here also challenge how photographic views are usually directed in the preschool and how the children’s and the cameras’ views, thereby, can turn a more traditional panoptic construction (Foucault, 1991) in preschool upside down. In addition, the children demonstrate ethical and democratic approaches. By following the children and their camera agency, it becomes obvious that preschool teachers and researchers have a lot to learn from the children, especially because ethical issues concerning power relations are always at stake in preschool (Merewether & Fleet, 2014) and in research with young children (Dockett, Einarsdottir & Perry, 2009)." (Authors, 40)