Hidden in Plain Sight: Exploring Double Exposure in Early Childhood Research

• In Event: 47.068 - Picturing Inquiry, Framing Childhood: Examining Drawing, Photos, and Photography in Critical Early Childhood Research

Abstract

Purpose
This paper explores how an early learner’s photographs disrupted traditional ways of ‘seeing’ in critical qualitative research. Focusing on one, seemingly trivial picture among a deluge of photos (Figure 1), it prompts important questions about research with early learners. What does the image reproduce? What does it challenge?

Perspectives and Framing
I build from Szarkowski’s (1966) five elements of photography and segment my findings accordingly. Drawing from sociocultural anthropology (Edwards, 2015), I interrogate what happens when the researcher wants to photograph something in the field, but “the researched” captures the researcher capturing it. Simultaneously, I question the teleological tendencies of researchers exploring still images.

Modes of Inquiry
Using data from a year-long case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005), the larger project included interviews with 22 child participants and hours of digital recordings alongside my notes as a participant observer. Yet, I had not anticipated children’s vantage point in the larger inquiry nor did I expect them to use digital cameras to produce a flood of images. Few of the photos they produced were for their individual compositions (their primary task). Rather, they took pictures of their peers composing. This project explores these child-produced images. I focus on a single photograph in a series taken by Steph —an 8-year-old, self-identified Black boy. I selected Steph’s image of the stationary camera—an object hidden in plain sight—because it illuminates a common tension of visual data in fieldwork.

Data Analysis & Findings
I adapted Szarkowski’s (1966) elements for analysis. For example, I noted how Steph framed the picture, depicting an isolated camera, absent the student-produced visuals on the nearby bulletin board or colorful seating available in the workspace. Similarly, I recognized how his image stood in contrast to the others in the sequence insofar as it lacked the flurry of children nearby. In this way, Steph’s image is neatly framed, free from the multitude of bodies in the surrounding space.
I initially overlooked Steph’s image, filtering it, as I sought images that ‘fit’ with the goals of the larger project. The image taken by Steph tells a different story of ‘the thing itself’ while also being a single fragment of a larger narrative and sequence of photographs. Yet, by capturing the stationary camera, Steph’s image “suggested that the subject had never before been properly seen,” (Szarkowski, 1966, p. 8). Simultaneously, Steph’s vantage point in the image calls attention to the colonizing nature of research and imitates the surveilled nature of the ever-present, ever-rolling video camera. In turn, Steph both “challenge[d] and rejecte[d] our schematized notions of reality,” (Szarkowski, 1966, p. 11) by showcasing how the lens (in this case, of both cameras) is not impartial.

Significance
This paper holds significance in that it, draws attention to “the colonial gaze of the camera” (Edwards, 2015, p. 239) in early childhood research. Moreover, Steph’s image highlights how photography, as a social act, is always already embedded with power relations.

Author

• Cassie J. Brownell, University of Toronto