Documenting young people's production of visual culture: heritage as lines and movements

• Young people are seen as both consumers and producers of culture. This can be seen in cultural heritage intuitions and how young people's cultural production is categorised, preserved and exhibited. Children’s perspectives are important in understanding what it means to be a young person at a particular moment in history, thereby to make children’s narratives and voices accessible to future generations is of most importance. The present paper scrutinizes young people’s picture practices and archive material on young people’s pictures to see what is captured. The data are part of a larger research project: Children’s cultural heritage – the visual voices of the archive and consists of ten semi-structured in-depth interviews with youngsters 11 to 20 years. Drawing on Ingolds (2007) concepts lines and meshwork, the paper discusses how young people’s pictures are created, recreated, and used in various settings. When youngsters pictures are made part of archives, this usually means that a single picture of a motif is included. The present paper argues that if the aim of the archive is to say something about what it means to be young at a particular time, then archiving pictures as single visual expressions does tell us little about how it is to be young and how young people’s picture practices looks like. Furthermore, the idea of lines may help archives to display and document children as actors, not in the sense of creating single pictures, but as individuals on the move in and across different settings with various purposes.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Övrig annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Other Humanities not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)