Childhood | thinkingaboutphoto

Photography looks at Childhood

May 1st - July 31st

Spring 2026

Mitchell Family Album, photographer unknown

Children versus childhood. Childhood is really about the journey we make through the circumstances we didn't choose: the home we were born into, the world outside our door, the adults who loved us, or didn't. As infants, we learn to talk, to walk, to feed ourselves - and then comes childhood, the long journey of discovering what the world is and how we will make our way through it. We accept what we find as simply real. This is what makes childhood so consequential - we adapt, we survive - and in doing so, form beliefs about what is possible, and who we are.

I was drawn to this theme for a couple of reasons. I was taken by an image of a child photographed at eye level, looking out over the bombed ruins of his neighborhood. I found myself thinking about his future - about the tremendous mark that landscape would leave on his life. I was also drawn to the theme by my own experience as a new mother. When my son was an infant, I noticed something strange about our culture. Bring a baby into many American spaces and you'll get looks of barely concealed horror. But walk into my local Mexican restaurant, and our usual waitress would gush, sweep him up and disappear into the kitchen so everyone could meet this marvelous creature. In too many American spaces - restaurants, weddings, airplanes - children are only welcome insofar as they can be monetized or managed.

Mediator FoM, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photography has a long history of taking childhood seriously as a subject. In 1955, Edward Steichen's landmark exhibition The Family of Man walked us through the great cycles of life - courtship, marriage, pregnancy — and into childhood and beyond. Images of children from around the world, at play, at rest, with their families, spoke to a commonality of experience that crossed every border. In 1983, Mary Ellen Mark began photographing a group of homeless youth living on the streets of Seattle. From this work came an extraordinary relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl, Erin "Tiny" Blackwell, whom she continued to photograph over the following decades - as Tiny grew up, had children of her own, and continued to struggle with the legacy of the childhood she had been given. It is one of photography's most sustained acts of witness. Where Mark observed, Richard Tuschman's recent My Childhood Reassembled turns inward using sets and actors to "reflect my experience in that time and place as a young child trying to make sense out of his world and his family relationships." Finally, on a tangential note is the organization Eye Mama Project which features "photographers who identify as mothers, parents and carers documenting their personal experience of care through self-portraiture."

In this showcase, I found myself drawn to projects that place children back inside the natural world. Most of the work here is observed — the quiet, attentive gaze of a photographer watching childhood unfold or the impact that culture has on identity. We also have one project that looks back at childhood through the lens of remembrance: an adult trying to make sense of a world turned upside down by war, returning to a childhood landscape that was lost. From PhotoBook Journal, we have six reviews of books examining a wide range of approaches and experiences related to our theme of Childhood.