The Play Residue Project

When I set out on this adventure of documenting play residue, I wasn’t sure where it would lead me. My underlying goal has been to highlight the value of play in all its iterations and to provide a counter-narrative of the beautifully set up provocations and playscapes, that while I value creating provocative invitations, can sometimes create unrealistic ideas about how children play. This week I have taken a different perspective, I am thinking about the tool I use for this project – the camera.

Sylvia Kind (at least at the time of writing the article) worked as an atelierista at an ECE program in Victoria. I was interested to think with this article in terms of the play residue project.  While the article has led me down many roads of reflection on my practice and documentation, and the various intra-actions and entanglements between educator-children-space-camera, my focus here is on some of the reflections I have had in relation to the play residue project (though even those cannot be fully separated from my overall practice as an ECE and Forest School practitioner).

This structure of self-other, as Rose (2004) writes, assumes that the ‘self’ is the pole of activity, presence, and power and the ‘other’ is the pole of passivity (p. 20). Sturken and Cartwright (2009) emphasize that the act of looking tends to award more power to the person who looks than to the person who is the object of that gaze (p. 111). This awards primary power to the one with the camera who is doing the looking and subjugates the one being imaged; it emphasizes that the self who photographs is active, and the other who is photographed is passive….. Nevertheless, the power of the gaze, who looks, why they look, what it means to look, how the looking takes place, the violence, voyeurism, or complicity of looking, and the desire to look, are ideas that play powerfully in historical and contemporary photography. (Kind, 2013, p.428-9)

While my focus does not include the children, I am provoked to reflect on my position as I choose what to document, what is included and what is left outside of the frame. I am the voyeur. As I continue to think with this article, I do wonder how it what ways it will provoke me to think in new ways about this project, children’s intra-actions with materials, and play.

I wonder what would children choose to document at the end of the day? Right now, I am the one who chooses what is photographed, what is residue is documented.  If I were to share these pictures with the children what would thoughts, theories, and ideas would these images elicit? How would they engage with these photos?

The children’s own discussions rarely engaged with questions of who took the photo, what it meant, how it reflected a particular view, experience, or perception, or how it gave insight into a particular individual’s process. Their conversations tended towards engaging with the photos and following their prompts, for instance, acting in response to the images, posing as the figures in the photos, enacting and re-enacting moments, playing in their company. In this way we might see photography as a way of worldmaking, not just world mirroring (Goodman, 1976), an event (see Atkinson, 2011), rather than primarily a representational medium or process. Haraway suggests (1997) that we are located in these worlds, worlds that are always for some and not for others. I wonder, if photography’s colonizing gaze produces certain worlds and inscribes identities in particular ways, what might happen if we entertained other possibilities and other ways of seeing? What possible worlds might photography help us imagine?

My mind keeps circling back to worldmaking. I look at these photos which elicit memories, sounds, smells, histories. I start to wonder, again, how the children in our program would experience these photos? If shared with my colleagues, I wonder what these photos would elicit?

Barad (2011) questions how the boundaries around such entities are made and proposes other ways of understanding the materiality of the physical world where all matter, for instance the camera, photograph, and other human and non-human elements, are agentic and in constant intra-action. This means we do not just look at the thing itself, its meaning or essence, rather the dynamic spaces between and consider how things are ‘spun together in a dense web’ (Bennett, 2004, p. 354). So we engage in a world, not of subjects and objects, rather various materialities, material relations, multiplicities, groupings, compositions, alliances, and intra-actions (see also Lenz Taguchi, 2010). We are drawn to pay attention to what happens between child–adult–camera–photograph, and the movements of materials, resulting resonances, traces, and entanglements. (433-4)

While the photos have been taken at the end of the day after the children have gone home, captured a moment before the materials are put back into bins and crates and brought back inside I begin to see them as in a suspended state of play. For me, what I am photographing represents unfinished projects, a to be continued. If the toys were left as is, I wonder what play this would inspire when the children returned to Forest School.

We tend to think that photography is different, that it ‘captures’ a moment and arrests it … But here, in the children’s choreography of movements, compositions and performances, photography, as assemblage, moves with the ways of the world (Kind 2013, p.437).

Perhaps we need more active ways of thinking about photography; to think of making images rather than taking them and to remember ‘photo-graphy’s’ original meaning of ‘drawing with light’. Drawing hints at actions, gestures, marks and movements, and making as processes of invention (Kind 2013, p.438).

References

Kind, S. (2013). Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 427-441. doi:10.2304/gsch.2013.3.4.427

As referenced by Kind