Abstract:
In Aotearoa New Zealand, teachers frequently use photography to gather data for assessment. The practice of taking photographs of children to make their "learning visible" has become normalised and common practice. New technologies have made visual documentation easier to produce through digital cameras, personal computers, and printers. Increased use of photographs for documentation purposes has led to increased photography of children. This thesis argues the ethics of this practice of photographing young children is undertheorised and an argument is made for critical analysis of photography use in early childhood. Philosophical consideration of photography use for documentation and assessment is crucial in developing ethical practice. Communication with photographic images has, as Vilém Flusser predicted, become a defining aspect of the post-industrial world. The photograph has infiltrated most areas of society, and education is no exception. Flusser offers provocative arguments and a way to theorise the upsurge of photographic images in the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Working with an eclectic set of theoretical lenses this research uses philosophy as method to question the processes and practices of photography use in early childhood education. Flusserian concepts significant to this thesis are: apparatus, information, technical image, abstraction, program, and freedom. Pedagogic photography is examined through the constructs of camera-apparatus, archive-apparatus, and state-apparatus. Combined with a concern for visual materiality and a Foucauldian curiosity in history and social practices, these concepts offer a way to think about the processes involved in producing and consuming photographic images. This thesis contends an ethics of pedagogic photography must go beyond concerns of privacy, surveillance, and consent, to also consider questions pertaining to the power of apparatus behind information creation. The ways photographs are made and used are influenced by apparatus. Moving beyond the programmatic affordances of the apparatus is an expression of human freedom, one which opens up possibilities to engage with photography ethically.