The impact of Covid on children:
- I read this article talking about how children are losing essential parts of their childhood and development due to Coronavirus, and the virus may hit the youngest generations the hardest in years to come. 'For the youngest children, this can mean losing critical sensory and physical experiences, like touching and hugging, pinging around the playground, and imaginary play. Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, says those exchanges are how kids calibrate their social skills and regulate their emotions. They thrive on real-time feedback from peers and can't get that in a social vacuum.' https://mashable.com/article/coronavirus-children-and-teens-social-distancing/?europe=true
Made me think about how we are already losing the traditional idea of childhood of play and freedom and imagination to technology - kids being forced to grow up too quickly because of social media and how my school year were once of the last age groups to go through primary school and the first 10 years of our lives without social media and phones. I started thinking about the impact that this is going to have on younger people in my generation and how there's possibly going to be a childhood deficit in a way - will we always have a yearning to play and have childlike naivety because we never got to properly experience it? - not really speaking from personal experience but thinking especially about my younger brother and his friends who I've been able to see grow up and have such different and almost lesser childhoods despite him only being 5 years younger than me, because of the rapid introduction and advancement of technology and social media in the last 10-15 years or so - so much has changed in such a short amount of time.
This made me think that I could make my project about some of the following:
- comparing the experience of different people's and different generations experiences of childhood
- could use this project as a chance to be kids again - take photos of me and my mates and siblings playing again, reclaiming parts of our lost childhoods in a sense. Allowing for mess, imperfections, lack of judgment etc.
- take inspiration from drawings and things I made as a kid - I've always loved how free, creative and innocent art is that we make as kids - making me think of work by Yeondoo Jung who I looked at briefly in A level.
Yeondoo Jung
Jung transformed crayon drawings filled with sweet and sometimes bizarre imagery into real life photographs. Without the help of any computer graphics, Wonderland takes us from fantasy to reality in one fell swoop. For four months, Jung oversaw art classes in four kindergartens in Seoul and collected 1,200 drawings by children between the ages of five and seven. After pouring through them, he carefully selected 17 drawings and interpreted their meanings. Then he recruited 60 high school students by passing out handbills at their schools in which he invited them to act out the scenarios in the children's drawings. In order to recreate faithfully drawing details such as dresses with uneven sleeves or buttons of different sizes, he convinced five fashion designers to custom make the clothing for the photo shoot. He also made props unlike any scale found in reality but similar to those in the drawings. (https://mymodernmet.com/childrens-drawings-come-to/)
I love how playful and vibrant this collection is and how it's breathing a new light into the often forgotten works of wonder that we create as kids. I think this is a really beautiful idea and I'm definitely thinking that I want to create something this playful and nostalgic for my project.
Initial Ideas for shoots:
- going to the beach and taking photos of flatmates playing in the sand, building sandcastles etc. - going to the beach and playing in the sea is a really fond childhood memory of mine
- getting flatmates to make massive paintings and drawings, handprints, stick men etc. all things we draw as kids and photographing the process
- asking flatmates and family members to recall their favourite childhood memories and try to recreate them?
My own childhood drawings:
The Cottingley fairies:
In 1920 a series of photos of fairies captured the attention of the world. The photos had been taken by two young girls, the cousins Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright, while playing in the garden of Elsie's Cottingley village home. Photographic experts examined the pictures and declared them genuine. Spiritualists promoted them as proof of the existence of supernatural creatures, and despite criticism by skeptics, the pictures became among the most widely recognized photos in the world. It was only decades later, in the late 1970s, that the photos were definitively debunked. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200603-how-covid-19-is-changing-the-worlds-children
I love how much of a stir these photos caused and how playful, magical and youthful they feel.
James Perolls
'James Perolls paints a picture of childhood innocence.' https://www.ignant.com/2018/04/11/james-perolls-paints-a-picture-of-childhood-innocence/
Although his photos are very editorial I love how playful Perolls still makes his work feel really playful and as the quote says elude to childhood innocence. I especially like the warm sepia filter and warmth of the lighting that appears in a lot of them, it makes the images feel very nostalgic and like they've come out of a storybook.
German photographer Thomas Friedrich Schaefer has created Experiential Spaces, a series of photos that are inspired by fragments of his childhood memories of growing up. At the same time, he wants to stimulate the viewers to bring out their own childhood memories too.
...The lighting is to only one type with no changes at all. Schaefer shoots with Profoto studio flashes with a shutter speed of 1-1.5s to allow the light bulbs to register.
“Memories are, for me, like dreams. They got that glow,” says Schaefer. “I could just find and recreate that glow in night/dark situations.” And therefore all his images are at dusk or nighttime. https://petapixel.com/2017/07/07/photographer-turns-childhood-memories-photos/
I really feel like I've stepped into the mind and into the memories of Schaefer through these photos. The low, mostly single sources of light enhances the dreamlike nature of the images and I think the choice to have the people in the photos looking away from the camera is really clever as it makes them feel like a snapshot in time, and not a heavily staged photograph. I definitely think that after seeing these photos I'll make some very similar choices in my own work as I think it could really work well with my theme to try and capture people's inner child and exploration of childhood.
Catherine Opie
I came across this image by Catherine Opie and really liked the childlike imagery which has been made to look like its been carved onto the subjects back. This image made me think about different ways I could bring childhood imagery into my photos. I also really like the symbolism of the imagery in this photo, depicting two stick women holding hands outside their home instead of the heteronormative man and woman. As a queer woman herself, I know that Opie likes to photograph and document the LGBTQ+ community around her and question the way we look at family, love and relationships through her work, something that I would like to do too.
Comments