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An inventory of traces: children’s photographs of their toys in three London homes Kate Pahl Visual Communication 2006; 5; 95 DOI: 10.1177/1470357206060919 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vcj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/1/95

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visual communication 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]


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 understood 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. T H E D ATA S E T

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 backgrounds. 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: ●

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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. Table 1 Data collected for the study

Edward, 5, and Mary, his mother

Fatih, 5, and Elif, his mother Sam, 6, and Parmjit, his mother

86 drawings collected, produced at home

207 drawings collected, produced at home

25 texts collected

21 field visits, over 2 years 30 field visits, over 2 years

29 field visits over 2 years

4 taped conversations with the child



1 ethnographic interview 1 ethnographic interview with his mother with his mother

2 ethnographic interviews with his mother

15 photos taken by Mary, 17 photos taken by Fatih, 15 by Edward 18 by researcher

76 photos taken by researcher, 34 by Sam

6 texts from Edward’s school

8 texts collected from Fatih’s 1 observation of text classroom making at school

2 field visits to Edward’s school

1 field visit to Fatih’s classroom

4 field visits to Sam’s school

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 Pahl: Children’s photographs of their toys


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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). T H E S T U D Y: M E T H O D O L O G I C A L I S S U E S

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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T H E V I S U A L C U LT U R E O F T H E H O M E

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 arrangements of stuff in homes were textual artefacts. I used visual ethnography to uncover the settled taken-for-granted textual arrangements in the home. 100



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 observations 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. T H E O R I E S O F E V E RY D AY L I F E

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). Pahl: Children’s photographs of their toys


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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, privatisation 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. L O C AT I O N S O F T O Y S A N D P L AY

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 ‘small102



Figure 1 Sam’s first photograph of toys on his bedroom floor.

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 Story, 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 photographed 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 Pahl: Children’s photographs of their toys


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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).

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. 104



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).

Figure 4 Edward’s photograph of toy trains on the floor of his front room (18 May 2000).



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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.

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 106



Figure 7 Fatih’s photograph of his new television.

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 Pahl: Children’s photographs of their toys


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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.

(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 108



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).

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

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 purposemade 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 livingroom 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 greatgrandfather’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. REFERENCES

Ayata, S. (2002) ‘The New Middle Class and the Joys of Suburbia’, in D. Kandiyoti and A. Saktanber (eds) Fragments of Culture. London: I.B. Tauris. Banks, M. (2004) ‘Visual Research Methods’, Social Research Update 11 (consulted 29 December): [http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/sru/SRU11] Bock, M. (2004) ‘Family Snaps: Life-Worlds and Information Habitus’, Visual Communication 3(3): 281–93. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice, trans. R Nice. Cambridge: Polity.

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Daunton, M.J. (1983) House and Home in the Victorian City. London: Edward Arnold. Douglas, M. (1991) ‘The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space’, Social Research 58(1): 287–307. Geertz, C. (1993[1973]) The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Fontana. Hall, C. (1999) ‘Understanding Educational Process in an Era of Globalization: The View from Anthropology and Cultural Studies’, in E.C. Lagemann and L.S. Shulman (eds) Issues in Educational Research, pp. 121–56. San Francisco: Condliffe Jossey-Bass. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D. and Cain, C. (2001) Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Cassell. Lefebvre, H. (1971) Everyday Life in the Modern World. London: Allen Lane. Lemke, J.L. (2000) ‘Across the Scales of Time: Artifacts, Activities and Meanings in Ecosocial Systems’, Mind, Culture and Activity 7(4): 273–90. Livingstone, S. (2002) Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage. Miller, D. (ed.) (2001) Home Possessions. Oxford: Berg. Mitchell, C. and Reid-Walsh, J. (2002) Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood. London: Routledge. Orellana, M.F. (1999) ‘Space and Place in an Urban Landscape: Learning from Children’s Views of their Social Worlds’, Visual Sociology 14(1): 23–88. Pink, S. (2001) Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representations in Research. London: Sage. Pink, S. (2004) Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory. London: Verso. Sharples, M., Davison, L., Thomas, G. and Rudman, P. (2003) ‘Children as Photographers: An Analysis of Children’s Photographic Behaviour and Intentions at Three Age Levels’, Visual Communication 2(3): 303–30. Smith, D. (1988) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. London: Duke University Press. Van Leeuwen, T. and Caldas-Coulthard, C. (2004) ‘The Semiotics of Kinetic Design’, in D. Banks (ed.) Text and Texture – Systemic–Functional Viewpoints on the Nature and Structure of Text, pp. 355–83. Paris: L’Harmattan. Williams, R. (2001[1961]) The Long Revolution. Letchworth, Herts: Broadview Press.



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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: [email protected]]

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Visual Communication - CiteSeerX

Visual Communication - CiteSeerX

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