Nia Kovacev

As humans, our conscious and subconscious minds play a massive role in who we are. But what we do not realize is our subconscious minds develop when we are children and are, for the most part, set in stone that way for the rest of our lives.

The past few years of my life have opened my eyes to many phases of life that make humans the way they are. Being the oldest kid in my family and coaching gymnastics, I am constantly surrounded by children of all ages, on top of my everyday life of being surrounded by teenagers the same age as me. So, for my final photography project, I wanted to focus on different ages of children and how each phase of life pushes you into slowly becoming an adult. Through the life lessons we have to learn to become an adult, we often lose our sense of innocence. When you are first born you don’t think much. You want to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom. But as time goes on and we get a little older, we learn to walk, talk and eventually we gain more and more awareness of the world around us. We are introduced to love, tragedy, drama, hate, crime, loss, etc... This sense of reality might not come all at once but it comes, so as our ideas become more complex and we lose that sense of innocence when all that mattered was who was going to shove food in your mouth and when.

Society is constantly shifting, and with that so are our values and how we learn. One major thing I learned from each photograph I took was that whether we want to admit it or not, we are shaped by not only the individuals around us, but every object and thing that is around us. This is not necessarily bad, it is just something I hope this body of work helps others better understand and become more aware of.

The way my thought process of executing this started was with documenting younger kids from the ages of 6 months to 8 years old. With this variety of ages, there are small shifts and big shifts that show how children start to lose innocence as they grow. The first few images show a small shift between the ages of 6 months and 4 years old. When you see the different ages of children put next to each other you start to see the older kids become less reliant on others and more dependent on themselves. As children grow up this becomes a major theme. Fast forward to the last set of images in this body of work, there is a complete sense of freedom. Now teenagers can drive and are much more reckless than they would have been when they were slightly younger. They also have many more ideas of the world around them and have been introduced to these complex ideas which adds another level of stress they never had to deal with earlier in life.

As much as I would have loved to capture more of the ages between 12 years old to 18 years old to really complete this idea and get a full look at how much children lose innocence because of the society they live in, I was unable to do so. I do hope to eventually finish this project and document the every day life of these age groups.