Touching heritage: embodied politics in children’s photography

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research with children in Athens, the authors examine sensual, performative and embodied aspects of children’s photographic representations of a monument that is central in the Greek national, cultural and historical discourse, the Acropolis. Moving away from the hermeneutics of cultural domination, the focus of this article is on how the pictures depicted the monument and how they were used by the children. Assuming an analytical framework which incorporates aspects of sensual experience in the analysis of the photography, the authors discuss how the children’s pictures of the Acropolis not only make visual records of the monument, and thus are not simply visual evidence of the centrality of the mainstream Greek national and historical discourse, but also how they entail the children’s embodied relation to it, and what this relation might tell us about childhood expressions of heritage and belonging, and by extension about politics in childhood. The analytical focus on embodied aspects of children’s photography illuminates complexities of cultural representation and their gestural, discursive and political significance.

Celebrating 20 Years of Visual Communication

“…In this regard, we see much scholarship reflecting the need for greater diversity of disciplines and approaches, of topics and themes, and of visual and multimodal representations of factors such as ability, gender, and ethnicity (see for example, Caple and Tian, 2022; Zhongxuan and Lin, 2021). We see great potential for visual communication scholarship to impact positively on contexts and fields such as politics (Chu 2021; Varvantakis & Nolas 2021), healthcare , both mental and physical (as with Bennett, this issue; Forceville & Paling 2018; Mondada, this issue; Robson, 2022), and our understanding of critical social crises , such as the experience of refugees (Catalani 2019; De La Presa and Ruiz, 2021), environmental disaster (Björkvall and Archer, 2021; Kwesell, 2021) and of course, the pandemic (Luvaas, this issue; Selamet, this issue; Yu and Yan, 2021). We continue to seek examples of the best and most recent innovations in visual design, be it at the national scale of grand institutions and exhibitions (Jones, 2020), or individual experimentation with expression (Cooper 2022; Raappano-Luiro, 2020).…”