Whose Story Is It? Thinking Through Early Childhood with Young Children’s Photographs

Looking back at photographs of herself taken by adults in preschool, 6-year-old Saloma (all names are pseudonyms) articulates a rebuttal to adults’ representations of young children. At the age of 4, Saloma had participated in my classroom research, taking photographs and talking about the images in interviews and in a group with her peers. In her pictures and accompanying narratives, she revealed the complexity of her shifting, multiple identities (Grieshaber & Cannella, 2001) as hyper-feminine, daughter of a single mother, young child, consumer, etc. When we returned to the same images two years later, she recalled her precarious relationship with a classmate and proclaimed her newer preference for rock and roll versus the Disney ballads she’d liked when she was younger. Revisiting her photos piqued Saloma’s interest. She asked to see more, but we only had the 25 she had taken with the research camera. Instead, we looked at photos taken of her for the teachers’ documentation purposes. In seeing images taken by adults, Saloma suddenly became indignant, recognizing an identity constructed for her (and for other children, as indicated by her use of the word “people”). She spoke on this topic for nearly 30 minutes, recounting the undesired pet names that teachers (including myself) often gave her. What was so striking about her exposition was just how clearly and carefully she verbally articulated these matters and memories. Between the ages of 2 and 4, she expressed her displeasure in ways that we as adults seemed unable to register. For how long had she been containing these feelings?