Paper

Photographing Young Children

Senior Project: Understanding the Minds of our Generations

Adelaide Keene

4/12/17

Throughout all the stages of life, it seems to be as though the teenage years and the years spent in the early developmental phase, are the hardest to be understood by the outside world. Teenagers tend to seemingly scare the older generations, due to their sense of mysteriousness. I find this fear of teenagers fascinating, because all humans were teenagers at one point in their life and should be able to recall what they feel and want. Preschool aged children are also in a developmental stage. Similar to teenagers, children aged 3 to 5 have a difficult time expressing themselves in ways that the older generations can easily understand.

According to Erik Erikson, a psychologist specializing in child psychology, there are multiple stages of psychosocial development throughout the early years of life into mature adulthood. During the ages of two to four, children begin to learn and understand the idea of autonomy vs the concepts of shame and doubt. In the later years of preschool, and early kindergarten, children are exposed to initiative vs the feeling and concept of guilt. During the teenage years, from ages 13 to 19, the main area of psychosocial development includes identity vs the idea of isolation. During these years, teenagers begin to uncover who they are as a person, what role they play in society, and the importance of isolation. Although each age group has it’s own list of developmental stages according to Erikson, the stages do not need to end or be completed for the next stage to begin. All throughout our lifetime these multiple stages overlap, at different times for different people, making everyone unique.

The source that became my inspiration for this project is Human’s of New York, a social media platform that gives the world a sneak peak into the lives and minds of those around the world. The photographers ask questions and document their responses, taking a photograph to go along with them. The photos that accompany the writing isn’t always a portrait photo, or a photo of their face. For example, some photos could be of their hands, their hair, their back, or even their shoes. Reading through the Human’s of New York posts, I formed the idea to photograph preschoolers and ask questions that allowed the outside world to be exposed to small parts of a preschooler’s mind.

Once I concluded that I wanted to photograph preschoolers, I had to research how to photograph children. Children are often thought to be tricky subjects, due to their short attention span and inability to stay still. I found multiple blogs with photographers depicting what techniques have and haven’t worked while photographing children. The website I found to be the most informative was the Digital Photography school’s website, written by Darlene Hildebrandt. Through years of working with photographing children, she found several tips to be the most productive. The most important tip, in my opinion, is to get down to their level. Instead of taking a photo from above, which gives the viewer of the photograph a sort of “towering over” feeling, kneel down and take the photo at eye level with the child. There were a few more helpful clues, such as keeping an open mind, allowing the child to run the shoot and not have too many boundaries up, and choosing the focus mode carefully.

Photographing children is much different than photographing older teenagers and adults. When adults and teenagers are being photographed, they will behave differently and change from their natural poses and facial expressions when they are aware there is a camera. My conclusion to this is that as we get older, we become more aware of our appearance to others and a camera allows us to be vulnerable, due to the fact that the photographer chooses which part(s) of our bodies they take the photo of. On the other hand small children, from my experience, tend to not change their positions

I found that it was easier to photograph young preschool aged children rather than high school aged and older.

The source that I found to be the most informative and helpful was the social media platform called Humans of New York. It was started by a photographer named Brandon Stanton, a young man whose goal was to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers. After starting this project and having conversations with the people he was photographing, Stanton began to include interviews in his interactions with people and write short stories from their lives with the photographs. I discovered Humans of New York about two or three years ago through Instagram and have recently liked their page on facebook which allows their media to show up on my feed. The short insights to these strangers lives have made me laugh, cry and inspired me. I was taken by the captivating portraits of these people. Stanton manages to really capture the emotion in the faces of the people he is photographing. The amount of emotions, personal information and life stories that people are willing to share with Stanton really are incredible and say a lot about who Stanton is as a person. Generally, strangers don’t share that amount of personal stories to other strangers.

I had a slightly different experience photographing and interviewing the preschool students at the Chilmark Preschool than I imagine Stanton did with the strangers ranging in age in New York City. Working with these same kids months before photographing and interviewing them allowed them to feel comfortable with me. The same goes for photographing the high school students, but in a less comfortable way, for I had known these high school students for four years and sometimes more. That said, the high schoolers that I chose to interview and photograph were students that I wasn’t necessarily very close with. This was part of my mission to understand and meet fellow seniors on a deeper level before we graduate.

If I were to continue with this project in the future, I would strive to increase numbers. I would also want to interview and photograph people of all ages, from preschool to elderly and everything in between. The responses through all different stages of life would be very interesting to hear.

Bibliography

Humans of New York

Hildebrant, Darlene. "Photographing Kids." Digital Photography School. 10 Sept. 2014. Web. 15

May 2017.

"Early Childhood Education." NEA. National Education Association, Web. 15 May 2017.

Lionette, Heather. "Home." Chilmark Preschool. Web. 15 May 2017.

"Children." American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association, n.d. Web. 15 May 2017.