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Visual Communication
DOI: 10.1177/1470357206060919
2006; 5; 95 Visual Communication
Kate Pahl
An inventory of traces: children’s photographs of their toys in three London homes
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ARTICLE
An inventory of traces: children’s
photographs of their toys in three
London homes
KATE PAHL
University of Sheffield, UK
ABSTRACT
This article draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of three London
homes. It considers photographs taken by three 5–7 year old boys of
collections of toys, arranged on floor spaces and bedrooms, and objects
within homes. Two households were working class, and the third home
middle class. Using the concept of the inventory, representations of toys
and their semiotic affordances are considered. Time and space are
considered with regard to the collections photographed, as well as the
implications for a visual ethnography of the home in the context of the
ethnography of everyday life.
KEY WORDS
children • everyday life • homes • photographs • toys • visual ethnography
INTRODUCTION
The home, said Mary Douglas, is a ‘realisation of ideas’ (Douglas, 1991: 290).
It may be pertinent to ask, however, whose ideas are realized within the
home? Adults often share their homes with children, and while they may like
to create a home that is full of their visions of decoration, children also
produce ‘stuff ’ which they find aesthetically pleasing, which may be different
from an adult’s version of design (Pink, 2004). In this study, a selection of
photographs by children is presented, part of a wider dataset of children’s
texts within the home. Photography was used to elicit the child’s view of the
home. To do this, the researcher used the methodology of giving children
access to a camera within the context of an ethnographic longitudinal study
of children’s meaning making in the home. The resulting photographs reveal
an interest in a landscape of toys, placed on a bedroom floor or living-room
floor, collected in groups, or displayed in action scenes.
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi:
http://vcj.sagepub.com) /10.1177/1470357206060919
Vol 5(1): 95–114 [1470-3572(200602)5:1; 95–114]
visual communication
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These photographs explored the affordances of particular toys to
represent action, or to form a collection. The ethnographic study focused
specifically on the notion of ‘inventory’ or, ‘what there is’ within a home to
build up an understanding of the meanings within it. Texts were seen as
traces of social practice, and in this study, the relationship between the
practice of play and the photographs was explored in interviews with the
children. In the case of the photographs, the images were traced to everyday
practices within the home such as small-world play.
In all three homes, photography was part of the settled social practice
within the home. An understanding of how the families used cameras
informed the discussion of the images presented in the article. Home movie
cameras were available in two out of three of the homes, and used for special
occasions. For example, one mother filmed her son re-enacting a PlayStation
game. Another filmed her son’s birthday tea party.
In all the homes, framed photographs of the children were
incorporated into decoration and design. Photographs were part of a wider
landscape of communication found in the homes. Representations were
made using video cameras, photographs and drawings of toys and play in the
home. Photographs were taken on holiday and displayed in photograph
albums, and were often showed to me. The taking of photographs was under-
stood as part of everyday representational practices within the home. They
represented the ‘idea’ of the home, and also constituted part of it. The
researcher (the author) entered this landscape with a camera, adding to the
representational practices already existing within the home.
THE DATASET
The children’s photographs were taken from a larger dataset of field notes,
taped talk, interviews and texts, produced from a two-year ethnographic
study of three London homes. In each home, there lived a 5-year-old child.
Two of the three families came from relatively low socio-economic back-
grounds. One family was middle class. The researcher took up a regular space
within each household, visiting for one hour every other week, and observed
practices and text making in a naturalistic setting, recording informants’
words using a tape recorder. As part of the focus on children’s meanings, a
disposable camera was given to each child to take photographs, and the
researcher collected it one month later. When the researcher entered the
homes, different methods of recording information were used: a camera, a
notebook and a tape recorder to record data. The camera became naturalized
during the 2-year period as being part of the ‘tools’ of ethnography and was
used by the children to take photographs during field visits.
I met the children through contacts in education, and through family
literacy teaching in a North London borough. They consisted of:
● Fatih, 5 years old when the study started, Turkish, and his mother Elif,
whom I met in the family literacy class I taught. Fatih lived in a housing
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association-owned block of flats in North London. Fatih’s father lived
separately from the household and worked in a kebab shop.
● Edward, 5 years old when the study started, who lived on a large council
estate in North London. His mother, Mary was a learning support
assistant and was training to be a teacher. Edward’s father was a bus
driver, separated from Mary during the study.
● Sam, 6 years old when the study started, and Parmjit. Parmjit was of Sikh
origin. They lived near me in a council house. Parmjit was a teacher and
taught in local schools. Sam’s father was a musician who lived separately
from the household at the time of the study.
The photographs came from the dataset illustrated in Table 1. They
can therefore be seen in the context of a much larger body of data. The
photographs were illuminated by the longitudinal ethnographic dataset of
which they were a part.
PHOTOGRAPHY AS A METHODOLOGY
The use of photographs to record informants’ life worlds has been used in a
number of different contexts (Bock, 2004; Pink, 2001). This has included the
use of cameras to record children’s perspectives (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh,
2002; Orellana, 1999; Sharples et al., 2003). A recent study by Sharples et al.
(2003) involved giving children single-use cameras and asking them to use
these over a weekend without adult interference. The children were
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Table 1 Data collected for the study
Edward, 5, and Mary, Fatih, 5, and Elif, his mother Sam, 6, and Parmjit, his
his mother mother
86 drawings collected, 207 drawings collected, 25 texts collected
produced at home produced at home
21 field visits, over 2 years 30 field visits, over 2 years 29 field visits over 2 years
4 taped conversations 2 taped conversations with 6 taped conversations with
with the child the child the child
1 ethnographic interview 1 ethnographic interview 2 ethnographic interviews
with his mother with his mother with his mother
15 photos taken by Mary, 17 photos taken by Fatih, 76 photos taken by
15 by Edward 18 by researcher researcher, 34 by Sam
6 texts from Edward’s 8 texts collected from Fatih’s 1 observation of text
school classroom making at school
2 field visits to Edward’s 1 field visit to Fatih’s 4 field visits to Sam’s
school classroom school
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subsequently interviewed about their photographs. The findings provide an
illuminating backdrop to this study. For example, it was found that younger
children tended to take more domestic photographs and more photographs
of posed toys and possessions (p. 313). This finding concurs with this study,
which revealed that a popular type of photograph was the image of the
collection of toys in the home. It is this theme I explore in this article.
The use of photography as a method raises concerns that the focus of
these photographs may be the content rather than the context (Banks, 2004;
Pink, 2001). The use of photographs to record significant (mostly positive)
life events is a naturalized part of the textual production of many homes.
Pink (2001) observed how ‘ethnographic photography can potentially
construct continuities between the visual culture of an academic discipline
and that of the subjects of collaborators in the research’ (p. 50). This
observation is particularly pertinent in this study, where a camera was
brought into a setting in which cameras were already everyday objects, part
of a digital representational continuum which included video cameras and
cameras, as well as other textual forms such as drawn texts and writing.
Mitchell and Reid-Walsh (2002) suggest that the ‘gaze’ of the child can
be accessed when their representations through photographs are involved.
While recognizing the limitations of this approach, they argue that children’s
photographs can undercut adult notions of what can be represented. Of
children’s photographs taken without adult supervision or knowledge, they
observe:
Focus, positioning, and so on give them a certain ‘illicitness’ and it is
only when parents get the photographs back from being developed
that they realise that the child [has] taken a snapshot. At the same
time, however, they provide what might be described as an ‘insider’
point of view that may challenge certain adult notions of children’s
play. (p. 91)
It is this otherness that is under investigation here. Recognizing the
continuum between photography as practised by adults in the home, as well
as considering that the view of the child can offer distinctive differences from
the adult perspective, as evidenced by Sharples et al. (2003), this article
explores in more detail how children’s photographs reflect on the ‘idea’ of the
home, and stuff within the home (Douglas, 1991).
THE STUDY: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
In this study, cameras and photography were a settled part of the textual
practices of each household. Photographs were displayed on mantelpieces
and walls and, in two out of three cases, a video camera recorded key
moments. In the case of one household (the Turkish household), field notes
recorded how the video camera was used to record aspects of life in the UK,
which were then sent to Turkey for grandparents to watch. As part of my role
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as ‘observer’, I was shown home movies, and my interest in the family
extended to watching special events recorded on video. The photographic
images displayed on the walls of each home were images of the children in
posed positions reflecting the focus of the parents on the children in a
settled, fixed space. The use of the photograph frame was evident and the
children were aware of themselves displayed in photographs in prominent
positions in the household. Elif had a photo of Fatih taken as a young child
on her kitchen wall. Parmjit displayed an image of Sam as a baby on her desk
and Mary included photographs as part of the display in her glass cabinets.
The data described here constituted an intervention in that the
children were given access to a camera and asked to take the photographs
themselves. The visual image therefore has an emic quality. While
recognizing that there is a relationship between the etic and the emic in
constructing an ethnography, there is, nevertheless, a value in hovering low
over the data (Geertz, 1993[1973]) and developing a close eye on the
perceptions of informants. This close eye was never fully the eye of the
informant; however, it could be argued that it was an intersubjective gaze,
constructed jointly by myself as ethnographic researcher, and the child in the
home (Hall, 1999).
The enterprise of inviting children to take photographs involved both
the use of disposable cameras and the researcher’s own camera. About a year
into the research, I gave the children a disposable camera to record anything
they wanted. However, one of the children lost his camera and other images
were returned but without a clear ‘history’ of the image. Because this tactic
only partially worked, I then made a habit of taking in my own camera,
which became a jointly used tool. While I often did take photographs of the
children’s texts for my own purposes, this usually happened in the context of
a field visit when a child would take a photograph. These occasions often
arose in the context of discussions about toys. For example, Sam was
explaining to me about his small-world play on his bedroom floor and then
used my camera to fix the play, using it alongside a commentary. He later
took the photographs which I gave back to him, and remounted them. The
photograph became an artefact of identity, part of his own play world
(Holland et al., 2001).
In each case, the history of the children’s involvement with the camera
was part of the context of the use of the camera. Banks (2004) observed that
the context of photography is as important in the unravelling of the
photograph as the content. Here, the context was often a shifting
representational landscape with digital images, such as television, video
cameras and cameras used to record and document family life. However,
outside the study, adults were the people behind the camera while children
posed for photographs. In the study, the children used the camera as a form
of documentation, as a way of producing still images of action and to make a
visual representation of a collection of objects.
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THE VISUAL CULTURE OF THE HOME
An aesthetic focus of the home has been considered by Pink (2004) in which
she discusses adults’ perceptions of their homes in Spain and the UK. Pink
observed that ‘Visual home decoration is interlinked with the construction of
the self in the present through selective biographical representations of the
past . . . and projections of an imagined future (p. 64).
Pink’s argument is that visual home decoration is a representation of
identity. She construed the home as text, or ‘idea’ which is a realization of self
(Douglas, 1991; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001). This textual space can also be
gendered. A study of suburban homes within Turkey explored how the home
acted as a gendered space, demarcated through specific areas (Ayata, 2002).
Ayata’s study of suburban Turkish households explored how women’s
aesthetic sense of decoration dominated within the home, while a male focus
extended to the outside world (p. 32). Economic contingencies also act upon
the home space. As can be seen from the following extracts from interviews
conducted for this study, the parents articulated a concern for home
furnishing which reflected their children’s interests and concerns, but they
recognized the economic limitations of following children’s interests.
Parmjit, for example, said of her son’s past interest in Thomas the Tank
Engine:
Parmjit: the one thing he doesn’t go near of course is the Thomas stuff but I
think in a way maybe he overdid it. And he now feels rather
embarrassed about it for example I don’t know when you first
came but for example he still had the Thomas curtains and that
was partly because I couldn’t afford and I couldn’t be bothered and
I just thought they’re nice blue we’ll keep ‘em.
(Interview, 11 April 2001)
Parmjit’s observation that the curtains are outdated is coupled with
her recognition that it is wasteful to throw them out just because the ‘craze’
for Thomas the Tank Engine has expired. Here the decoration of the home
becomes a site for contestation, as two different notions of aesthetics, the
mother’s and the child’s, compete for space and resources.
While the study was taking place, I tracked the way homes were
furnished, the changing shape of the home as children grew older and
bedrooms were changed around, and watched the accumulation of material
objects into the home (Miller, 2001). My focus on the home as text
encouraged me to ‘read’ the arrangement of stuff in the home as a set of signs
(Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001). From Kress and Van Leeuwen, I recognized
that ‘a house is a highly flexible set of signifiers, available for the constant
making of new signs in the transformative acts of social living’ (p. 39).
By seeing the house as a set of signs, I acknowledged that arrange-
ments of stuff in homes were textual artefacts. I used visual ethnography to
uncover the settled taken-for-granted textual arrangements in the home.
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Visual ethnography enabled me to acknowledge ‘the interwovenness of
objects, texts, images and technologies in people’s everyday lives and
identities’ (Pink, 2001: 6).
In this article, I move between the images and, drawing on the
fieldwork I conducted, situate these images within field notes and obser-
vations from the ethnographic study which recorded informants’ everyday
life, identities and cultural production. I consider floor space, bedroom space
and glass cabinets, in particular. Some objects in two of the homes were
arranged in glass cabinets; in one home, the cabinet was especially built to
accommodate objects. I regarded bedroom floors as a culturally focused
textual space (Mitchell and Reid-Welsh, 2002). In this way, I recognized the
home as text, but also tracked the way the home could change as a textual
production. In addition, I realized that different viewpoints of the home
existed within the same space, and that adults and children occupied very
different spaces contemporaneously. The use of the camera by the children to
record their interests highlighted this difference and took it significantly
further.
THEORIES OF EVERYDAY LIFE
I saw textual production as shaped by the habitus and by accrued, iterative,
social practices within homes (Bourdieu, 1990). I looked at what was present
within a home and used the idea of inventory to compile lists of what I found
in the home. I drew on Gramsci’s concept of the inventory of traces as
quoted by Said (1978): ‘The starting point of critical elaboration is the
consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of
the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces,
without leaving an inventory’ (p. 25). However, Said adds that Gramsci
emphasized in the original Italian ‘therefore it is imperative at the outset to
compile such an inventory’ (p. 25).
I attempted to amass a partial inventory of traces which, in turn,
made up the habitus. Throughout the field visits I used the concept of
inventory to list toys, programmes watched, games played, photographs
taken of holidays, food, home decoration, practices such as keeping pets and
hobbies, to inform my understanding of home texts. With that in mind, I
used the disposable cameras and my camera to find out what children’s
inventories looked like.
In considering the home and spaces within the home, I was informed
by theories on everyday life and cultural production with a focus on material
culture and relations of power within homes (Lefebvre, 1971; Miller, 2001;
Smith, 1988). I recognized how homes were sites of complex power relations,
and that within homes stuff was arranged in different ways. For example, the
Turkish household used doilies to indicate the notion of ‘specialness’, as in
Fatih’s image of the television on the white doily (Figure 7) while Edward
and Sam’s household used glass cabinets to indicate that objects held within
the glass were special (see, e.g., Figures 8, 10 and 11).
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The concept of home as a refuge and site for play, where domesticity
and decoration are focused upon, can be linked to a 19th-century concern
about recreation taking place on the street in unregulated spaces (Daunton,
1983). In Turkey, a suburban trend towards ‘increased domesticity, privati-
sation and feminisation of the home’, points to a withdrawal from the street
as space for recreation (Ayata, 2002: 37). Children’s lives are increasingly seen
as interior, which is sometimes referred to in the tones of a moral panic. This
moral panic has been associated particularly with the effects of such digital
media as PlayStation games, and satellite television. Digitized media have
been documented as being increasingly visible within homes (Livingstone,
2002).
In the research I drew on a notion of children’s conceptions of space
(Orellana, 1999). Orellana’s study of children’s views of their community
used children’s photographs to explore how children conceived of the spaces
they inhabited. This contrasted with Orellana’s own conceptions of space. In
a similar way, I contrasted my own interests within the children’s homes with
what the children chose to photograph with the cameras I provided. For
example, I was interested in the concept of ‘display’, as demonstrated by the
number of objects placed behind glass cabinets, and the concept of the
‘collection’. I looked at how homes could be seen as a site of cultural
production following Williams’s (1961) concept of culture as ‘ordinary’ (p.
54). Paying attention to the common practices of everyday life means that
moments of arrangement, of temporary focus on a space in a front room, or
a more permanent arrangement of stuff behind a glass cabinet become
highlighted. Thus, in this study, the settled ‘collections’ of adults, on
mantelpieces, or within glass cabinets, contrasted with the temporary
‘collections’ of children’s toys on the floor space of their bedrooms. By
tracing back what the photographs meant to the children, as recording their
play, I understood the practice of photography to be settled within the
dispositions of the household (Bourdieu, 1990). By tracing back the habitus
of taking photographs, from the use of a camera to make an image fixed like
a still to the idea of photography as display, the textual function of the
photograph comes to the fore. The taking of photographs is inscribed within
the habitus of the household. The difference with the children was the
‘otherness’ of the gaze, the perspective which Mitchell and Reid-Walsh (2002)
argue can give us partial insights into children’s visual worlds.
LOCATIONS OF TOYS AND PLAY
The bedroom floor
One space for children’s play that was both a focus for the children, and a site
for ‘mess’ and tidying up for the adults, was the bedroom floor. This example
indicates how a child can use a camera almost cinematically to record action.
In the following images, Sam has taken photographs of toys arranged on his
bedroom floor. Figures 1 and 2 were taken by Sam to accompany ‘small-
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world’ play on the carpet as I watched him one evening in his home. He used
small plastic objects, including Pokémon figurines and toy animals, to create
a ‘scene’. He photographed his toys in a number of poses. This was
accompanied by a running commentary:
Sam’s commentary
Charizard and Charmeleon are getting an ice cream. Blastoise is in the
pond he went over the track and into the aeroplane. Electrobuzz and
Blastoise are talking. The one in the aeroplane is Blastoise. Blastoise
and Electrobuzz they look good. (Field notes, 9 May 2000)
In order to analyse this image, I considered the concept of the kinetic
affordances of particular kinds of toys (Van Leeuwen and Caldas-Coulthard,
2004). The toys in Sam’s photograph were small and rigid but could be
moved around. They included Woody from the film, Toy Stor y, and several
Pokémon creatures as well as small cars, trains and farm animals. Here, Sam
is drawing on a hybrid medley of toys from different worlds to create a play
narrative in his bedroom. He used the Pokémon toys but also placed them
within a ‘setting’ from a different category of objects including trains and
cars. The kinetic affordances of particular toys determined the way they were
arranged spatially in that smaller toys were placed in relation to bigger ones.
Ones that could move or fly had a different function. They were then photo-
graphed from a very low angle: Sam lay on the floor to take the photograph.
The arrangement of toys
In Figure 2, a photograph taken a few minutes after Figure 1, Sam has
arranged his toys on the ‘carpet road’, which was provided for him by his
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Figure 1 Sam’s first photograph of toys on his bedroom floor.
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mother on his bedroom carpet, and photographed them from above. All
three boys owned this carpet road, which enabled toys to be arranged to form
different images, representing a town plan.
In this image, particular objects are linked by association of meaning
with particular places on the carpet. For example, a toy fish is placed in a
pond while a car is placed on a road.
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Figure 2 Sam’s second photograph of toys on his bedroom floor (taken a few minutes after Figure 1).
Figure 3 Edward’s photograph of toys on the play road on the floor of his front room (18 May 2000).
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These two still images represent Sam’s attempt to capture the
excitement of the play, and he was aware of the camera as a tool to create a
filmic narrative. Here, ‘lining up’ toys is not about the collection, but about
action. The use of the camera is inscribed into a notion of camera as a
recorder of action, moving its use into the genre of film.
The arrangement of toys in the front room
In contrast, Edward’s image of his toys was more static in quality. Figure 3
shows Edward’s image of his toys in his front room, using a similar carpet
road as play prop. As in Figure 2, the toys are positioned in relation to the
space on which they are placed – cars are placed on roads, ships on the sea.
Here, the toys are placed within the context of a play world, and they
are placed specifically within particular locations, i.e. cars go with roads and
ships with the sea. This photograph was taken in the context of a field visit
when I asked Edward about the toys he liked to play with. He took this
photograph to show me.
Lining up
As in the Sharples et al. (2003) study, many of the children’s photographs
recorded the gathering together of a collection of toys. Figure 4 shows a set of
toys on Edward’s front-room floor.
This photograph was taken by Edward in the context of a field visit
and a discussion of toys (18 May 2000). Here the toys are heterogeneous and
belong to the category of Thomas the Tank Engine. Edward had a keen
interest in classification and was a collector of miniature model trains (see
Figures 9 and 10).
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Figure 4 Edward’s photograph of toy trains on the floor of his front room (18 May 2000).
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The concept of the collection of similar objects was echoed in a
photograph Fatih took, at a time when the Pokémon card craze was at its
height. Figure 5 shows Fatih’s arrangement of his Pokémon cards on the
coffee table in his front room. Coffee tables were also a site for display, and
sometimes used as a place on which to make texts and display small objects
within homes.
This picture, which was taken with my camera in the context of a field
visit, indicated Fatih’s socio-economic status – Fatih had very few cards. He
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Figure 5 Fatih’s photograph of his Pokémon cards on the coffee table in his front room.
Figure 6 Sam’s photograph of his Action Men lined up by the television.
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traded cards with his brother. Fatih’s mother took a video recording of the
brothers from that time, which showed them outside the house, trading
cards. Fatih usually came off worst in the exchange. The photograph was an
indicator of ‘what there is’.
Focusing again on ‘what there is’ Sam amassed his collection of Action
Men and arranged them for a photograph. Figure 6 shows Sam’s Action Man
figures lined up by the television. This was taken one evening in the context
of playing with the Action Men.
The television was highly salient as both a prop and artefact in all
three homes. Figure 7 is Fatih’s photograph of his new television. As his
mother had recently separated from her husband many objects in the home
had been taken away.
The television also acted as a space on which to display objects, and
carries its own white doily to indicate its possibilities for arrangement. Field
notes from that period record Fatih playing many console games on this
television with his brother and cousin. Careful inspection of this photograph
shows that a console game is being played. The image could therefore
indicate a ‘toy’ as well as a home artefact.
Glass cabinets
The concept of glass cabinets in homes slides over into an interest in
museums. Samuel (1994) has documented a popular interest in museums,
preservation and ‘heritage’ as an enduring interest over the last century.
Likewise, Stewart (1993) notes an interest in the miniature and the collection
as bound up with the landscape of longing and desire. In the following
photographs, glass cabinets and their contents are recorded. Edward’s
photograph of glass cabinets in his front room shows a hybrid collection
of objects which include both child-focused and adult-focused objects
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Figure 7 Fatih’s photograph of his new television.
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(Figure 8). The image foregrounds the toys, including a toy Pikachu, again
reflecting the Pokémon craze; also, as with Sam, the hybridity of toys. Again,
a distinguishing characteristic of the small-world toys was their smallness
and rigidity, made of brightly coloured plastic material.
At the back of this photograph can be seen the glass cabinets which
held a collection of trains. Edward also photographed his model trains,
which, when they were not out on the carpet, were placed in the glass cabinet
for display. Edward described this collection to me while photographing a
model train made by his great-grandfather in India (Figure 9) and handed
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108
Figure 8 Edward’s photograph of the glass cabinets in his front room.
Figure 9 Edward’s photograph of a model train made by his great-grandfather in India.
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down to his grandfather, who gave it directly to him, hence the expression,
the grandfather’s train.
The photograph was accompanied by the following commentary,
which was tape recorded. Edward is describing the train collection to me but,
at the same time, he is on the living-room carpet, taking a photograph of his
great-grandfather’s model train:
Edward:
... and actually what I got is models before we used to collect
them now there’s no more left because I got all of them so now
there’s only one left and that’s the one I still got it was the one it was
the one it was the Bugton P 11 and it’s like this train yeah and it’s got
like this where it goes and it keeps going down and like your going
and like it’s a bend and you going straight and you down and up
Mary: Where was this?
Edward: In a book
Edward: You know the side [he is talking about the side of the train he is
trying to photograph] then I couldn’t see that side so I just took the
front now do the other side.
Kate: How old is that?
Mary: He died when he was seventy odd, he died when he was seventy,
thirty years ago.
Edward: My mum’s dad gave me this to one year ago and it’s um
Mary: Can you see the whole train
Edward:
...Thirty nine ...I can’t see the back
(Transcript, 7 June 2001)
Edward’s commentary and his mother’s comments refer to the train
made in India by Mary’s grandfather (who worked on the Indian railways)
and its history. This train had now become part of Edward’s train collection,
along with the Mallard and other trains. It took pride of place in the glass
cabinet. I recorded this by taking a photograph (see Figure 10).
Pahl: Children’s photographs of their toys
109
Figure 10 Edward’s model trains in the glass cabinet alongside the model made by
his great-grandfather. Photo taken by the author.
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Sam’s glass cabinet, especially constructed for him by his mother in
response to the many tiny objects he regularly made, housed his collection of
small models including his Pokémon hand-made replicas (Figure 11). This
cabinet was designed by Parmjit, his mother, who described the process to
me in an interview.
Parmjit: I was trying to sort out a display cabinet originally it was going to
go upstairs at the top of the stairs and um I realized that again it
was going to be quite hidden and they wouldn’t be seen so anyway
in the end I decided the living room and we were going to have like
a three sided glass cabinet. So anyway we’re going to have like two
glass [panels] And I also wanted a sense of that it had to be like a
finished piece of art. So I thought actually to give it a wooden
frame
...completely encloses it
(Interview, 26 June 2001)
However, Parmjit admitted this changed the function of the cabinet for Sam:
Parmjit: And in a way I’m changing its function for Sam. They started off as
toys they’re no longer now toys. They are actually artefacts
And they are very much memories.
(Interview, 26 June 2001)
I asked Sam to describe to me what was in the cabinet. However, when
he was asked to do this, initially he was quite reluctant, saying, (from field
notes, 20 September 2001): ‘My mum actually wanted to do this cabinet in
the first place’. He did not see it as ‘his thing’. However, when I asked Sam to
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110
Figure 11 Sam’s photograph of his models in their glass cabinet.
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tell me about the models he had made, he started to do this, and became
quite animated, moving back into the ‘mini world’ of Pokémon creatures he
had created, and telling me about each model and its meaning. The creation
of the display cabinet happened during the end of the fieldwork period, and
was developed in response to an intense period of Sam using modelling clay
to make models of Pokémon creatures, Egyptian artefacts, friends, pets and
other miscellaneous items (see Figure 11). Sam’s photograph reflected his
interest in the creatures he had made over the years, including the small
Pokémon figures he played with on his bedroom floor.
CONCLUSION
The ways in which Edward, Fatih and Sam arranged and photographed
objects in the home helped me to recognize how a focus on containment and
display was salient. The most extreme example of this was Sam’s purpose-
made glass cabinet. However, all three boys included some element of display
and collection within their photographs. The concept of the collection was
very noticeable, and both Sam and Fatih included an ‘all I have got’
photograph: the Action Man and the Pokémon cards. Edward and Sam used
floor space as a site for play, as did Fatih when constructing his games. The
study by Sharples et al. (2003) was very illuminating in exploring the
possessions that children chose to photograph but it did not explore how the
process of photographing interacted with play in the home. This article
shows that while the children in the study took photographs of their toys,
they also used photographs to group their collections and to act as sites for
continuing play.
This article argues that these images can be discussed both in relation
to the ‘idea’ of the home and in relation to the concept of inventory. As an
ethnographer, the dataset was enriched by an attention to everyday objects
within the home, and the spaces children liked to use for play. The living-
room floor was particularly important, as was the bedroom floor – and in
Fatih and Sam’s case, the coffee table. In all households, I noted that the
parents had a concomitant interest in ‘tidying up’ to reflect the disruption
toys had upon neat floor space.
By focusing on the inventory, the listing of what there is, there is also a
focus on what there is not. Fatih’s photographs also suggest absences, as with
his collection of Pokémon cards indicating how few he owned. The craze for
Thomas the Tank engine, Pokémon and an interest in small-world play with
trains and cars ran through the images, excluding more ‘girl-like’ toys. The
photographs are shaped by socio-economic status: Edward and Sam had
access to more material objects than Fatih, but also spatial affordances. Sam
was able to display his small handmade objects within a glass cabinet
specifically designed for them. Edward shared the family’s glass cabinet, and
Figure 10 (taken by myself) shows how his train models were placed within it
alongside a model made by his great-grandfather of an Indian train. The
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Indian train model was held within a much longer timescale than the play
trains but both were displayed in the cabinet.
The way each child conceived of play and small objects represented an
interplay between the possibilities of the object, and the timescale associated
with them. For example, Fatih’s Pokémon cards were a recent craze. Sam had
amassed a large collection of models, representing different crazes of his over
the years. Edward liked to collect a full range of a particular type of object,
such as trains.
By focusing on the concept of the inventory, and ‘what there is’, a
language of description is developed which looks at space and time in
relation to photographs and the habitus of the home. In relation to space, I
considered how particular toys carried particular semiotic and kinetic
affordances (Van Leeuwen and Caldas-Coulthard, 2004). I drew on Lemke’s
notion of timescales, and the semiotic affordances in relation to timescales of
particular objects. For example, Lemke (2000) described how an ordinary
sword carried a shorter timescale and accumulated more meaning than a
Samurai sword. When considering these photographs, space and time come
to the fore as analytic tools. For example, a comparison can be made between
the size of toys and the length of time they have been used. The Thomas the
Tank engine trains, for example, had a shorter timescale than the great-
grandfather’s Indian train, and were placed differently within the home.
By making this kind of inventory, based on the lenses of the
participants, the inventory of traces, the ‘stuff’ in the home, becomes shaded.
The things in the home begin to acquire particular meanings and the
heterogeneity of the objects begins to be dissected and taken apart. By
shading in details of the habitus, by exploring children’s representations of
their domestic spaces, and using the camera within a home setting, concepts
of home as a site for display and play come to the fore for adults and children
alike. Pink’s (2004) assumption of home as a controlled space for adult
design opportunities becomes unravelled in the context of children’s interest
in home as a site for exploration and play, and a place for amassing small
objects. The findings in this article take the visual ethnography of the home
into a contested and messy terrain, of meanings and representations for
adults and children all jostling for space on the living-room floor.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
KATE PAHL is a lecturer in Education at the Department of Educational
Studies, School of Education, University of Sheffield. She is the author of
Transformations: Children’s Meaning Making in a Nursery (Trentham, 1999)
and co-author with Jennifer Rowsell of Literacy and Education:
Understanding the New Literacy Studies in the Classroom (Sage, 2005).
Address: Department of Educational Studies, School of Education, University
of Sheffield, 388 Glossop Road, Sheffield S10 2JA, UK. [email:
k.pahl@sheffield.ac.uk]
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