Below Knee Level

A new show at The Photographers’ Gallery presents the history of children as photographers through their pictures, their comics and the cameras sold to them. It’s small, fun and packed with joyous details. It deserves a bigger space.

Heads

In 1960 Peter Harvey, aged twelve, photographed his family on the sofa. His sister is there, smiling, and so is Scampi the dog. His mum and dad are there too, but only from the neck down. The wall label says he cut off his parents' heads accidentally, presumably because he was more interested in the dog. Hang the same small print upstairs, with an adult's name beside it, and the missing heads might be read as a decision, possibly a pointed one about who matters in a family. Harvey’s photograph is silent on the matter. Whether a crop is an accident or a choice is a judgement we make partly based on how old we think the photographer was.

That question runs through the exhibition, curated by Annebella Pollen on the gallery's third floor.

Do you remember your first camera?

The exhibition opens with a question addressed to the visitor: do you remember your first camera, and the first photographs you took? It's a generous way in and the design (by Other Office) follows this lead. There is a fat, rounded seventies display font, walls in strawberry ice cream pink and mint chocolate chip green. There’s a huge collage of the covers of Ladybird and Puffin guides to photography for young people and a Movietone newsreel plays in the middle of it. For anyone approximately my age it's reminiscent of a bedroom wall, with overlapping pages torn from weekly magazines.

The warmth comes with a bit of a tilt. A history of children's photography is offered first as a prompt for adult memory and the children's pictures risk becoming triggers for our nostalgia. The show resists this better than its opening suggests, but the pull is there throughout.

It helps to know that much of what's on display comes from Pollen's own collection, shown publicly for the first time. Her interest began, she has said, when she handed cheap plastic cameras to her two-year-old and wondered what would come back. That gives the room an unusual intimacy. It also means the history has the shape of one dedicated collector's finds. That's how most histories of vernacular photography get made. It's worth bearing in mind all the same.

The timing is interesting too. Snap Happy! arrives ahead of the more encyclopaedic L is for Look, a touring exhibition of children's photobooks, apparently heading for TPG next year (although I can’t confirm absolutely), and alongside the gallery's own long investment in photography education (the third floor is its learning floor, established in memory of Terence Donovan). Why the sudden appetite for young people's photography? I can think of several possible answers. It could be a response to generative images, a turn back to pictures that someone actually made, or anxiety about photography's fugitive place in the school curriculum. I suspect though that there's something more sentimental underneath. In a culture drowning in images, we long for a time when a photograph was rare enough to be a small event, which a child with a Box Brownie seems to represent.

Who got the camera

The pink wall begins at Oundle School in 1896, with a group of boys in boaters and three-piece suits posing beside their tripods. Some slouch, some scowl. Beside them is Thomas Edward Donnison's cartoon from the Boy's Own Annual, in which a school photographic society runs riot in a yard, one boy up on the roof while a besmocked adult watches with hands in pockets, posing resignedly Photography arrives in children's hands as a privilege, and as mischief.

Oundle reappears a few frames later in the story of Francis Reiss, who fled Hamburg with his Jewish family as a boy, picked up a Box Brownie in Yorkshire at nine, ran the school's Photographic Society and, by sixteen, with a Leica, was working for Picture Post. It's a remarkable life, and a reminder of what a fee-paying school could supply.

The hinge comes in 1958, when the industry-funded Photographic Information Council launched the Junior Photographer of the Year award. Entry was limited to school camera clubs, prizes went to the schools, and over a thousand new clubs opened in the 1960s. Photography entered state schools for the first time. Anyone who teaches the subject in one now (like me) is working in a lineage that began, in part, as a marketing exercise.

Boys were the intended audience. Pollen has noted that, because photography was linked to science and technology, cameras went mostly to boys. Clubs flourished in boys' schools and the manufacturers spent their money accordingly. The Robin knitting pattern on the wall makes the point without trying. A man and a boy in matching jumpers, the man showing the boy his twin-lens reflex. Stop tittering at the back! The camera is a prop for selling wool. This reminds me of the many stories I’ve heard from art teacher colleagues in which SLT ask them to set up a photography GCSE so that the disenfranchised boys who don’t like art can fill up their timetables.

Girls, meanwhile, got heroines. The comics in the central vitrine are a delight. Camera-mad Carol wins a rangefinder and a year's free film in School Friend (1964). Snapshot Sue flees a speeding car on the cover of Judy (1972). And let’s not forget Snap-Happy Hetty from 1974. These girls catch criminals and expose frauds. It's tempting to read them as empowerment, and perhaps they were, but the chronology is sobering. They flourished in decades when real girls were far less likely than their brothers to own a camera. The girls had to make do with fantasy rather than the real thing. Only in the 1990s, according to Pollen, did Kodak discover that girls were the keener photographers and put them at the centre of its marketing strategy. (The 1969 Princess Tina cover, with its Kodak cameras to be won, complicates this a little, and I'd like to know more.)

The route through the room, then, runs from Oundle to the Lambeth estates of the 1970s, from privilege towards something like access.

Originality first

On the little screen set into the wallpaper, a 1966 newsreel called Developing Young covers the Junior Photographer of the Year competition. At one point a subtitle gives the judges' criteria: look for originality first, then good technique and presentation. It's said as if identifying originality in a photograph was simply common sense. My guess is that they meant something fairly modest: a picture that found its way past the conventional solution, the pictorialist sunset and the posed portrait that adult camera clubs prized. Children were well placed to supply that, mostly because nobody had yet taught them the conventions. Their originality was partly a gap in their education, rewarded as a gift. It's also worth noticing the ordering. Vision before craft, as though the two could be separated. Progressive art teachers had been making the same move with children's drawings for half a century. Franz Cižek in Vienna and Marion Richardson in Britain cultivated “free” expression in their classes, then exhibited the results as if they were natural. The modern painters who admired child art for its vitality were admiring, in part, a pedagogy.

A child's eye view of the world is formed partly in collaboration with adults. The exhibition is full of these collaborations. Robert Cooper read the manuals and followed Photo News Weekly's directions to make geometric “physiograms” with a torch swung from his bedroom ceiling. In 1991–92 the Telegraph Magazine gave a Middlesex family, the Boormans, free cameras and unlimited film. They took around 25,000 photographs in sixteen months, including View from Maxwell's pram by a two-year-old. Kodak, at the end of the century, gave disposable cameras to children under sixteen because it suspected they photographed differently from adults and wanted evidence. The results went into a teachers' resource and into the design and marketing of children's digital cameras.

The Boorman experiment sits awkwardly with the show's framing of a world “before smartphones.” Twenty-five thousand pictures by one family reads now as a rehearsal for the abundance that came after, organised by a newspaper.

The most radical collaboration is on the mint wall. In 1970s Lambeth, at the South Island Children's Workshop, Jo Spence and Terry Dennett gave children aged five to seventeen cameras, or helped them build their own, and taught them how to develop prints with household chemicals. One camera was made from a Wellington boot (it was known as the Wellieflex, and Dennett reported in Camerawork in 1976 that these contraptions worked). Afterwards the children drew over their prints in felt tip. A girl's portrait has become a clown, grey-nosed and yellow-eyed, with a collar scribbled in red and blue. The label tells us this embellishment revealed emotional attitudes to peers and authority, which may be true, though it's another adult supplying the psychology.

The Wellieflex is my favourite picture in the show. It sits in a room full of cameras made for children, the Fisher-Price, the Babette, the Barbie camera, the troll near the stairs clutching its yellow toy, and it's the only one made by a child. The camera you're sold and the camera you build out of a boot are different propositions and the exhibition includes both.

The man upstairs

In a kid’s photograph the beloved subject often goes in the middle, the dog or the sister, because it's the whole point of the picture. The edges are left to look after themselves and they're where the world gets in uninvited. Harvey's parents lose their heads. On a coach to Stratford in 1981, a hand swings into Peter Freeth's frame and blurs half of it pink. Ken Hanrahan-Smith's project from 1967–68 is called Below Knee Level, which is as plain a statement of a child's viewpoint as you could want: a bicycle dropped on the grass, a roundabout seen from its own height.

The cropped figure at the edge of a frame has a respectable history. Degas made it a signature of modern painting, learning it (on one long-running account) partly from photographs, at a time when the camera's indifference to what it cut off was new, and partly from Japanese prints. The camera's carelessness became a painter's strategy and then passed back to photographers as a knowing device. A child can produce exactly the same crop without knowing any of this. From the print alone you can't tell which you're looking at. Intention is granted to adults; accidents assigned to children.

Upstairs, running in the main galleries at the same time is William Eggleston: All that goes unnoticed, publicised with his tricycle, an adult photograph made from somewhere near a child's eye level. I don't know whether anyone at the gallery intended the pairing. I imagine most visitors might pass between the floors without connecting them. Eggleston, for all his sophistication, has often been described as having an innocent eye. The phrase is Ruskin's, from The Elements of Drawing (1857), and for Ruskin the “innocence of the eye” meant seeing colour as flat patches without knowing what they were. In Eggleston's black-and-white work you can clearly see the debt to Cartier-Bresson. In the colour, composition steps back a little and colour itself becomes the organising principle.

The children downstairs are not innocent in that sense at all. They care intensely what things are. Eggleston (who loathed the word snapshot and thought anyone using it about his work simply didn't understand photography) spoke of photographing democratically, with nothing more important than anything else. Children aren't democratic photographers. They have favourites, and their love of things is ferociously partial. Yet the pictures can look strikingly alike: the flag-like, central placement, the ordinary thing given full attention. They arrive there for opposite reasons. Eggleston is after a surface held edge to edge, and sometimes needs a central object to anchor it. The child puts the loved thing in the middle and barely considers the edges at all.

The test, then, is at the margins. In Eggleston corners are accounted for. In the children's pictures the corners are where accidents happen. Upstairs, we see an adult who spent his entire career learning to give mundane things the attention a child gives a beloved pet. Downstairs, we have children who mostly wanted to be taken seriously as photographers, borrowing the manuals and the language of competitions.

A waste of film

Near the end of the mint wall, in the Kodak project of 1999–2000, is a portrait of a dog in a cap and sunglasses. Danka, eleven, from Poland, dressed it up herself. The organisers, the label says, had worried that parents would think children's photographs were a waste of film. Danka's picture made her laugh, so she put it in a frame.

It’s a fitting finale to the show. On one side, the adults: manufacturers, judges, editors, researchers, teachers, curators, each deciding what children's photographs are for and whether they're worth the cost. On the other, a child who decided the matter for herself.

Snap Happy! How children became photographers at The Photographers’ Gallery closes on 21 February 2027.

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