ARJA HOP
MAKE AS STORY
Photography / Time / Making / Play
Make as story is a photographic research project developed during a working period at Gastatelier de Vindplaats, exploring how children experience and construct time, space and making through analogue and digital photography.
The project began with a simple question: what happens when different kinds of cameras are introduced into a studio where children are continuously making? How do digital and analogue cameras affect the way they look at their surroundings, at what they make and at one another? And what becomes visible when the same defined space, the atelier, is photographed throughout the time spent there?
Gastatelier de Vindplaats works from a democratic pedagogical approach in which children's independence is central. Rather than following predetermined assignments, they are given the freedom to experiment, make and discover at their own pace. Having worked with children alongside my artistic practice for many years, often within a more traditional relationship between adult and child, I was interested in what would happen if I stepped away from this directing role and allowed the photographic process to develop from the children's own actions and decisions.
Different photographic tools were introduced gradually. Digital compact and SLR cameras could be used independently, while rhe analogue 35mm and 6x6 camera were initially used with my assistance. Homemade pinhole cameras, light sources, an overhead projector and self-made negatives offered other ways of working with light and photographic time.
Within the atelier I also constructed a small photographic space: a space within a space within a space, the school, the atelier, the photo house, the camera, the image. Here children could work in relative isolation and concentration with a Mamiya twin-lens 6×6 camera on a tripod. They selected materials, objects or things they had made and decided for themselves what should be photographed and how.
I had imagined that I would introduce the children to particular photographic possibilities. Instead, almost everything I thought I might teach them, they discovered for themselves within a very short time, and then took much further.
The presence of cameras changed the way the children moved through and looked at the atelier. Cameras became recording devices, inspection tools, collaborators and elements within games. Children spontaneously constructed still lifes and portraits, documented objects they had just made and investigated overlooked corners of the room. They photographed while running, made extreme close-ups and produced sequences of images that became small animations.
A portrait did not necessarily mean a face. It could be an ear, a hand, part of a body or the activity someone was engaged in. A child might ask another child to photograph their hands while explaining how something had been constructed. Materials and objects acquired characters and became protagonists within self-invented situations. Gluing, hammering, folding, drawing and painting could themselves become stories.
The camera also introduced questions of proximity and boundaries. Children began asking one another whether they wanted to be photographed and learned to respect both consent and refusal. Looking through a camera became a way of negotiating distance: deciding what could be approached, what could be shown and what should remain outside the image.
Photographic time
The analogue cameras produced a different relationship with time.
Inside the small photo house, the continuous movement of the atelier could suddenly give way to intense concentration. A child would work quietly with the Mamiya and ask for assistance with focusing or measuring the exposure. Gradually these unfamiliar photographic procedures became part of their own working process.
Initially, after pressing the shutter of an analogue camera, the question regularly followed: “Where can I see the picture?”
There was nothing to see yet.
The film first had to be finished, developed and printed. The following week a contact sheet would appear on the bulletin board. Waiting became part of making the photograph. The moment of taking the image and the moment of seeing it were separated in time.
The pinhole cameras extended this experience of photographic time even further. Homemade from boxes, coffee tins and other containers, they were positioned at different places in the atelier at the beginning of an afternoon and exposed for approximately an hour.
In principle, they simply registered the light present in the room. But the children also began interacting with them. A camera might be moved temporarily, secretly turned around, covered halfway through an exposure or have its aperture taped shut. Sometimes a child would put on a pinhole camera and walk around with it for an hour.
The resulting photographs contain an entire studio afternoon within a single image. Objects and structures that remained stationary are clearly registered, while movement dissolves into traces and blur. The children themselves may become almost invisible, yet their presence remains perceptible through the activity recorded in the photographic material.
Comparing these photographs with exposures made when the atelier was empty revealed a striking difference. Without the children, the element of movement disappeared. The architecture remained, but the sense of time passing through the space changed.
Making as story
Gradually my original research question shifted.
What I had expected to become primarily an investigation of photographic materials became an investigation of time: the time of making, the time of looking, the time contained within a photograph and the experience of becoming absorbed in a moment.
The children's movements through the atelier continually shifted between concentration and distraction, observation and invention. They could move easily from one activity to another and work on several things interchangeably. Reality and fiction existed alongside one another. Something could be an ordinary object one moment and part of a completely invented world the next.
Photography became part of this same movement.
Although a photograph can initially appear to be objective evidence of a particular moment, the camera was drawn into the children's world of play and imagination. Things were photographed out of context until they became almost unrecognisable. Running while photographing produced unstable perspectives. Low viewpoints suddenly revealed the undersides of familiar objects. Details became environments and objects changed scale.
The more I was able to remain beside the children rather than direct them, the more unexpected the photographic process became. Without the pressure to arrive at a predetermined result, objects, materials and images appeared to acquire other meanings.
The camera did not stand outside the activity in order to document it. It became part of the making itself.
Analogue and digital photography reveal different experiences of this process. Analogue photographs slow the moment down and introduce waiting, materiality and delay. Digital images can be produced rapidly and sequentially; placed together as stop-motion sequences, fragments of activity begin to move again. Pinhole photography does something different still: an entire period of activity is compressed into a single long exposure.
Stillness and movement, analogue and digital, observation and imagination therefore coexist within MAKE AS STORY. Photography moves between recording and playing, between looking at something that exists and participating in the construction of something that did not exist before.
What remains is not simply a photographic record of what the children made. The images register making itself as a story unfolding in time — emerging through looking, moving, waiting, experimenting, imagining and making together.
“We’re all in power in different ways.”
— bell hooks, 1992
MAKE AS STORY
Photographic research developed at Gastatelier de Vindplaats
Analogue photography / digital photography / pinhole photography / stop-motion / 6×6 film
