The Child's Gaze

The Children’s Photography Archive’s mission is to celebrate and preserve children’s photography and to push the boundaries of our understanding of children’s visual cultures. We do this through our digital archive, bespoke projects and workshops in communities, museums and schools, through crowdsourcing and public engagement activities, and through our own research, research collaborations, and consultancy. The Children’s Photography Archive (CPA) is the first of its kind digital archive for children’s photography. At a time when images have assumed a central role in human communication, our aim is to recognise children’s photographs as artistic production, cultural artefacts, and historical records. 

The images selected for the Chennai Photo Biennale 2025 speak to key themes that organise the Children’s Photography Archive. In particular, the images selected celebrate various aspects of ‘the child’s gaze’ (series ‘the child’s gaze’, images 1-7). The concept of the gaze is central to our understanding of ourselves, of otherness and of difference and, it is argued, shapes the way we interact with the world around us. To date children have more often than not (like women, people of colour, and societies of the Global South) been the focus of a white male gaze that promotes a particular figure of the child: as innocent, as victim, as subjects of wonder and curiosity.

The Children’s Photography Archive offers children the infrastructure to record their everyday and project-based experiments of producing visual cultures, to return the gaze and to represent themselves and their lives. It gives credence to their experiences as these are visually captured and enables them to archive their current practices of self-expression and cultural creation for future generations to explore and appreciate.

The images on display at the Chennai Photo Biennale 2025 from the Children’s Photography Archive are derived from three different, international research projects that had a common methodology of giving children cameras to record different aspects of their everyday lives. The photographs (8-20) share different aspects of children’s everyday lives and what matters to them from the child’s perspective. The things that children in the various studies deemed important to share with researchers and then with permission to broader audiences touched on aspects of their spiritual lives, the role of technology in their lives, their relationships with animals and nature, their games and toys, the landscapes and monuments they encountered, and the way they spent their time. The photographs on display were taken between 2015 and 2022.

Melissa Nolas,  Director, Children’s Photography Archive