Activity: External talk or presentation › Invited talk
Description
We live in times when anyone with a smartphone can be a photographer; increasingly those producers are children. Young people can visualise and share their worlds at the touch of a button. Many cultural commentators speak of the unprecedented character of our current photographic condition, but these claims raise suspicions among historians. Practices never emerge without contexts. To test the novelty of children’s current photography practices, what are the old ways we should compare it with? Where were the precedents? How did we get here? For four years, Annebella Pollen has been scouring archives to discover how children became photographers in Britain. The results encompass societies in public schools in the 1880s, clubs to get East End boys off the streets in the 1930s, the proliferation of postwar hobby practices, socialist projects of the 1970s, and mass experiments in the run-up to the millennium.