Photographic Firsts, Seen From a Distance: Adult Memories of Childhood Camera Experiences

In 2012, Mass Observation, the British survey of everyday life, asked about first camera experiences, resulting in 175 responses from correspondents aged 19 to 93. Autobiographical accounts communicated photography-based familial hierarchies and parent-child power struggles. Photographic firsts (earliest material experiences of handling a camera and earliest photographs taken) have not previously been privileged as sites for identity formation. Similarly, while theorists consider photographs in intersection with gender, class and ethnicity, photography and age has mostly escaped analysis. This article argues that photographic firsts can be autobiographically revelatory. Memory studies scholars observe that childhood memories comprise the first chapter in adult life stories. They are ever-evolving age narratives that serve different purposes every time they are recalled, with striking parallels to theories of photography and time. Early childhood memories are used to construct turning points in selfhood. In Mass Observation life stories, and in later adaptations of Mass Observation questionnaires completed by Royal Photographic Society members, these become plot devices. Even when the resulting photographs are characterized as mistakes or failures by their makers, childhood memories of photography are tales of autonomy and coming of age; of earning their place, being shown their place, and exceeding their place. They show children seizing the means of cultural production and remaking the world on their own terms.