Anyone who has let a child take pictures with their phone knows what to expect when they next open the photo app. Blurry selfies taken at improbable angles. Portraits of parents and siblings with their heads cut off. Many close-ups of beloved toys. Adults usually have one response: Delete, delete, delete.
But a new exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London called “Snap Happy!” invites us to pause before we consign juvenile photographic experiments to the trash. We should consider celebrating and keeping them, it argues. Perhaps some even deserve to live in museums.
While children’s drawings and paintings have received attention over the decades — notably by modernist artists such as Picasso, Kandinsky and Jean Dubuffet — grown-ups have often been less indulgent about photography.
Aspiring photographers of yesteryear were instructed on the “correct” way to take pictures and warned not to waste expensive film. While the smartphone has made image-making effortless and cheap, it has also produced anxiety about screen time and the effects of social media on young people.
“Children’s photography has been marginalized,” Annebella Pollen, the show’s curator, said. “A lot of these images aren’t kept. Some of them are barely even looked at.”
Pollen became intrigued by the subject 25 years ago when she shared a cheap digital camera with her daughter, Poppy, who was starting school. Poppy filled the memory card with strange selfies and close-ups of pigeons and Lego figures.
That freshness of perspective and eagerness to break the rules — what the 19th-century critic John Ruskin called “the innocence of the eye” — is evident throughout the history of children’s photography as told in the exhibition and in an accompanying book.
Cameramakers marketed equipment to families as early as the Kodak Brownie, released in 1900. Toy cameras proliferated from the 1950s, some of them aimed at toddlers. For older children, a real camera was often a birthday or holiday present, and school camera clubs taught aspiring snappers picture-taking and darkroom skills.
Some of their images, which Pollen has unearthed through research, including a survey of nonprofessional photographers organized with the Royal Photographic Society, offer a compelling child’s-eye perspective.
One Scottish child, Allan Dodds (now in his 80s), borrowed his father’s folding camera, smuggled it into school and used it to take subversive pictures of his teachers. An English boy, Robert Cooper, made experimental selfies, double exposures and abstract long exposures, as well as defiant pictures of his preteen pals in the 1960s. Both are on view in the show; neither has had his work exhibited before.
In the 1970s, a London youth group encouraged children aged 5 to 17 to make pinhole cameras from candy tins and old rubber boots, and to develop and decorate their own prints, some of which are in the exhibition. In that group, Pollen said, “really young kids were given autonomy and trust, and encouraged to just do it.”
Every so often, grown-ups paid attention. In the late 1990s, in search of a new generation of consumers, Kodak offered free disposable cameras and processing to 180 children in Britain, France, Poland, Spain and Sweden as part of a research study. The aim was to understand what pictures they liked to take, freed from adult intervention (and, naturally, how best to market to them).
The results were published in the 2001 book “Children as Photographers,” many of whose images now look startlingly original. One Polish 11-year-old, Danka, contributed an oversaturated, flash-blitzed color picture of her dog wearing sunglasses and a hat. It could be by Juergen Teller. She told the researchers that she liked the shot because it made her laugh.
“There are photographs of toilet bowls, rude gestures, photographs taken to tease and annoy people,” Pollen said. “It’s amazingly unfiltered.”
Even so-called mistakes can tell a tale. “If someone’s head is cut off, maybe that tells you about a child’s priorities,” she said, adding, “Mistakes are often revelations.”
In high-income countries, where research suggests that as many as 70 percent of 10-year-olds now own their own smartphone, more children than ever take pictures and videos. Even if most are destined to remain in the cloud — particularly if more bans on social media for children under 16 come into force — it would be tragic if they disappeared, Pollen said.
“For many kids, having a camera offers a kind of independence,” she said. “It’s their record of what their life is like.”
Will the art world catch on? While a small handful of institutions exhibit art by young people — the International Museum of Children’s Art in Oslo has collected works by children from 180 countries — they often focus on drawings, paintings or textiles. Few mainstream museums pay much attention. This is the first time that the Photographers’ Gallery, Britain’s leading space of its kind, has devoted a show to work by young people.
Pollen said she hoped that the exhibition would encourage visitors to look again at their own youthful image-making — perhaps with a more forgiving eye.
“It’s a really crucial part of our life story,” she said. “A child’s world seen on a child’s terms at a child’s height.”
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