Unofficial Truths and Everyday Insights - Understanding Voice in Visual Research With The Children of Accra's Urban

Unofficial truths and everyday insights: understanding voice in visual re...
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Unofficial truths and everyday insights: understanding voice in visual research with the children of Accra's urban poor
Authors: Phil Mizen; Yaw Ofosu-Kusi [ show biographies ] DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2010.523278 Visual Studies, Volume 25, Issue 3 December 2010 , pages 255 Published in: 267 Publication Frequency: 3 issues per year Previously published as: Visual Sociology (1067-1684) until 2002 Download PDF (~1495 KB) View Related Articles
To cite this Article: Mizen, Phil and Ofosu-Kusi, Yaw 'Unofficial truths and everyday insights: understanding voice in visual research with the children of Accra's urban poor ', Visual Studies, 25:3, 255 - 267
Abstract
This article draws upon the use of photography to research the lives of children living in Accra, Ghana. Its aim is to consider method in visual research, and to reflect upon those modes of explanation and understanding that any consideration of method must require. It suggests a role for photography as a 'vector', as something capable of connecting our knowledge and understanding of the everyday with the everyday experiences and reality of others. Drawing upon the photographs and spoken testimonies of children who live and work on the street, and of children who live in a large informal settlement, the article advances an intimate connection between photography and knowledge of the everyday reality of children's lives, most evident in the capacity of children's photographs to surprise and highlight the fallibility of our understandings.
INTRODUCTION
This article is concerned with the voices of poor children and with how still photography may help us to hear them. Its starting point is research in which we have aspired to the production of collaborative and complementary practices through the
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forging of relationships with our participants that give meaning to the agency and purpose of children looking to survive under acute difficulties. In the course of this, we have wanted to take seriously what we believe to be the fortitude and creativity of children surviving under terrible conditions by giving them the means to speak and to express their voices. If we are to appreciate the worlds that children are required to live in, the considerable privations that these involve and the methods developed to get by, and thus avoid having to rely solely upon what others say or assume to be the case, then we must take seriously the commitment to listening to what children have to say as a precondition for telling their stories and for speaking what we believe to be the truth about their lives. One means to speak these truths is through our use of still photography. In our work with the children we have sought to complement our ethnographic practice by using photography to encourage the children with whom we work to become agents of their own inquiry. We do so in the belief that by giving over image-making to children we can utilise the weight and direction that a photograph can carry so that they can raise their voices and speak in pictures and in their accompanying words something of the reality of what it means to live as a child within Accra's informal economy. Here our key concern is with questions of method and, in particular, with how we have gone about the production of children's photographic voices and what this may mean for our knowledge and understanding. In doing so, our central aim is to begin to map out a (critical) realist position that accepts that the photographic voices produced by research like ours are necessarily a construction, but that sees no contradiction between this and their capacity to tell us something of children's lives independent of our means to know them.
POOR CHILDREN SPEAK

In ethnography, writes the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992), we have the means to make visible the lives of people presumed to have neither a past nor a present. In ethnography, she claims, we possess the capacity to record human lives through eye-witness observation, detailed testimony, long interviews and discussions systematic and detailed ways of reporting the lives of 'ordinary people' in which those we write for become party to the act of witnessing life's ups and downs, those moments of hope and fulfilment, banality and tragedy that choreograph the everyday living of others. More than description, she is equally convinced of ethnography's political intent and of how, in making records of the lives of 'ordinary' people, we possess one means of condemnation of those political economies whose basis is the everyday reproduction of poverty, insecurity and violence. In giving voice to those who have been silenced or forgotten, in bringing attention to the lives of people who have been (un)consciously hidden from view, ethnography can 'speak truth to power' (Scheper-Hughes 1992, 28) by telling the stories of these 'ordinary' people, those hitherto prevented from speaking, or lacking the means to be heard, those all too often assumed to have no history at all. This is especially pertinent for the children of the urban poor. More often than not silenced by orthodox knowledge, the children of the cities of the global South are rarely granted a presence in public discourse beyond an understanding of their worlds fashioned through the knowledge and language supplied by adults. All that children need, it is generally assumed, is enlightened professionals to speak on their behalf as if somehow the best interests of the child are self-evident and plain to see (Boyden and Hart 2007). One consequence is that children's own understandings and
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experiences of their situations, their attempts to protect themselves or surmount the often-excruciating contexts into which they involuntarily enter, have remained largely unacknowledged. It is in the silences that envelop children from the global South, the absence of a means for them to speak and the reluctance to listen to them, that their talent for living continues to go unrecorded. We, too, hold close the conviction that ethnography can speak truth to power, that poor children have voices and that what they say is worth listening to, and in exploring Ghana's 'new urban childhoods' we have sought to encourage children to raise these voices and tell their stories. In one of these projects our starting point has been the labour required of children living and working on Accra's streets (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2010), and in a second, smaller project we have addressed how children conduct their lives in the slums of central Accra (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2009). For both we have taken seriously the need to attend to what these children know and feel by providing the means for them to speak and be heard, communicate and be seen, loosely structured encounters with us as researchers that permit children to voice those sometimes sophisticated understandings that we have come to know they are more than capable of providing. Our modus operandi is the creation of dialogues with a purpose through long-term fieldwork in and around the places where children work, play and live, and which they call their home, and through which their feelings, thoughts and reflections can be explored and recorded. These thoughts and reflections have been garnered through chance encounter and informal conversation, field observations, loosely structured interviews and group discussions and, for some, we have records of their daily movements and activities. We have also looked to still photography, and in giving over image-making to children we see a further opportunity to attend to their voices, where, in taking control of a camera, a child is permitted another means of speaking and being heard, only this time in pictures and their accompanying words. In this respect we see ourselves as collectors of images made by others, and in this an ethnographic role for photography can be likened to Sebastiao Salgado's (2000) description of photography as a vector, where a photograph can possess a weight and direction capable of connecting lives otherwise separated by time and space. In this way, photography can become part and parcel of the process of ethnographic research and observation, of eliciting unofficial truths and everyday insights, and of being able to communicate these to others in a position neither to see nor to understand. Our work with photography is thus more than a matter of inclusion, of likening the importance of giving children a voice to effecting their consultation (Roberts 2008). Such a right to being heard is a prerequisite, but children have voices regardless of what we give them. They can hold insightful, coherent and sometimes sophisticated understandings of the world around them, possessing a reflexive capacity as human agents that finds expression in their hopes and fears, aspirations and concerns, and those 'projects' and strategies that they create in response to the constraints (and enablements) into which they involuntarily enter (Archer 2005). In using photography, we thus seek a way for children not only to speak, but to do so in a way that reflects this agency by using their voices in creative and distinctive ways in which the process of photography, of making pictures and then reflecting upon what is viewed, becomes a different means of reflection and of offering comment upon their lives. In asking some of the children with whom we research to create photographic accounts of their lives and then to enter into conversations about the resulting images, we have sought to establish new ways for children to articulate lives very different to those that we are more accustomed to.
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This view is one not shared by all, and in a critique of an earlier article2 written by one of us, the similar use of photography has been subject to severe rebuke (Piper and Frankham 2007). This critique is, to our mind, neither logical nor especially effective, but it is undertaken with particular earnestness in the disdain it expresses for photography as a medium capable of communicating something of the reality of children's lives - indeed, of communicating anything authentic at all - and in the cynicism it directs towards the motives of those like us who would assert the contrary. The principal accusation against us is that, for all our concern with eliciting the voices of children, when all is said and done we are complicit in the maintenance of a decidedly one-sided encounter. Having seemingly put to one side questions of who is speaking by handing over image-making to those more normally the object of the photographer's attention, we are nevertheless accused of reasserting our own voices. In insisting that photography can allow children to speak to us of the truth of their lives, we are held to confuse subject with object, representation with reality, so as to 'write the author out of his [or her] work and insert [our] own stories'. Rather than finding innovative ways for children to voice their concerns and aspirations and then dealing with what is said with care and attention, our photography becomes a pretext for the production of our own preconceptions and prejudices which are 'superimposed' onto the children's images. Our commitment to the voices of children is thus, at best, no more than a rhetorical flourish, and at worst an act of 'ventriloquism', as '[Mizen thus] fails to show us anything beyond his own intention and desire, which has become the subject of the image' (Piper and Frankham 2007, 381, 385, 384, 383).
WHO IS SPEAKING AND WHAT IS BEING HEARD?

This is not the place to write a reply, even if we were so minded. Nevertheless, in claiming a role for photography as one way for children to speak to us about their lives, we must take seriously questions of voice, of who is speaking and what is being said, since it is beyond doubt that a photograph is incapable of speaking for itself in unequivocal tones. Rarely seen but often criticised, traces of the na ve objectivism of which we are accused are nevertheless discernible in Briski's much-vaunted work with the children of sex workers in Kolkata, where her faith in the transparency of her children's photographs is more a matter of what she fails to make clear than of what is said. She states that her project is informed by the idea that 'I thought it would be great to see this world through their eyes' and that by handing over cameras, she could 'create a bridge between these children and the rest of the world, giving their visions a forum to be shared and experienced' (Briski 2004, 17, 19). The limitations of Briski's project lie not so much in her equating seeing with knowing, nor in the value she attaches to children's photography as a means of observation and disclosure, but in the assumption that this relationship between seeing and knowing is clear and self-evident, one that requires little or no elaboration. Such a straightforward relationship between a child's photograph and what it is held to communicate fits pleasingly with the tenor of Briski's narrative, but it is, of course, a position that is unsustainable. It rests upon the far from certain assumption that we can know from viewing a child's photograph the intentions that lay behind its making or the stories that it is intended to tell, that photography can allow a child to speak without the need for further explanation. How do we know what we are looking at and what it is that these children wanted to tell us? Are their photographs meant as art, documentary or subversive comment? From Briski's silences the answers are far from clear. To satisfy questions like these would require the elaboration of context and design, analysis and argument, and thus the acknowledgement that Briski's
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photographs, like ours, are made by children under particular conditions and put to use for specific ends. Rather than assuming that 'kids with cameras'3 can express themselves with pristine clarity, it would require accepting that such a distinctive way for children to comment on their worlds has been fashioned from particular assumptions and shaped by specific ways of seeing. In recognising the constructedness of photographic voices like these, we nevertheless detect little influence of those who, like our critics, look for what a child's photograph might tell us within a self-contained world of intra-discursive abstractions. Far more significant, however, is what Harper (1998) identifies as the abandonment of a (na ve) realist visual ethnography in favour of understandings of photographic meaning and voice as a negotiated process, where the positing of a direct and obvious relationship between what a photograph depicts and what it says is replaced by an understanding of voice and meaning as inter-subjectively created. In Pink (2001, 24, 20), for instance, photography takes its place within ethnography conceived of as a fictive endeavour, where questions of what a photograph can say and the voices it contains are always the product of negotiations between researcher and subject, rather than the communication of simple or self-evident truths. '[I]mages,' Pink maintains, 'have no fixed or single meaning and are not capable of capturing an objective reality,' not least because, in standing between our informants and viewers/readers, the ethnographer is required to give her images meaning in words of her own making. It is into this process of making meaning that the subjectivity of the ethnographer must necessarily intrude, so that what images made by respondents like ours can communicate, what they can tell us about their lives and the voices that they are made to carry, is always ultimately an expression of the consciousness and 'reality' of the researcher(s). 'If the researcher is the channel through which all ethnographic knowledge is produced and represented, then the only way reality and representation can interpenetrate in ethnographic work is through the ethnographer's textual constructions of ethnographic fictions.' To accept that our understandings of children's photographic voices are always constructed is not to concede, however, that what is said is never more than the 'fictions' of what people like us choose to make of it. The messages and meanings the children's photographs carry are, like all kinds of data, indeed impregnated with assumptions guiding their selection, collection and interpretation, but to see these voices as the product of our own preoccupations is a non sequitur. It does not follow that because we must necessarily interpret the discourses of others via our own, then we are not studying independent discourses, that the voices we hear and see through the children's photography confront us as a reflection of our own ideology. To follow this line of reasoning would be to participate in the 'pomo flip' in which the acceptance that we can only know the world through the means we possess for its representation and mediation is mistaken for the production and constitution of that world (Sayer 2000, 68). To be able to make sense of what a children's photograph says, we must possess concepts and understandings allowing us to do so, but what is encountered in these voices can never be conceptually determined, as if what is communicated in or through an image will always yield to our theories and expectations. For us, the certainty that the voices we hear must be the children's and not ours is to be found in how they use their photography to tell us of what we know, but often in new or distinctive ways, to offer up fresh insights and novel observations, or to throw into sharper relief the limits to and errors in our knowledge.
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FIGURE 1. Rob, male, 16 years old.
SHOW AND TELL

These are certainly among the intentions of the children with whom we have worked. 'In social science, as in most other disciplines, images need words, while words do not necessarily need images' (Chaplin 1994, 207) and so, wherever possible, we have accompanied the children's picture-making with individual and group discussions. From these conversations, often amongst the most animated of our research, we have learnt much about the children's photographic intentions and how and why they have put their cameras to work. Framed within a knowledge of broader research interests, our guidance to the children is simple: we ask them to use their cameras to make a photographic account of a day in their (working) lives. And from the subsequent discussion of these images we have come to know something of the intentions behind their image-making and the voices that their photographs are intended to convey. Central to this is a literal (visual?) intent as the children hold close to their cameras as a means to illustrate and describe. In discussing their photographs, we are routinely informed that 'This is what I wanted to show you' (Abena,4 female, 16 years old) or 'This is what I wanted you to see' (Emmanuel, male, 15 years old). As we flick through their photographs of people and places, situations and contexts, pictures of those observable aspects of the social and physical terrain within which the children live and work, we encounter the desire to bring to us for our close-up and detailed attention specific aspects of their daily lives, to use their photography in order to show and tell. Generally, when we gave you the camera what did you want to do with the camera? I wanted to show some of the things around me; some of the things did not Rob come out well. I took some pictures of the refuse dump, how the toilet in the area looks like, the sawdust park where I play my football. (Male, 16 years old) YOK The children thus offer up their images as evidence, as visual records capable of communicating something of the visible detail of their physical surroundings. Among these pictures are many of the places where they work, of those they work with and
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alongside and, less often, of those they work for. Here we are told of vibrant markets, hectic thoroughfares and narrow alleys, stationary queues of vehicles at traffic junctions along whose lines vendors hawk their wares, and crowded lorry parks and transit stations teeming with travellers. Elsewhere their images are intended to tell us of the physical fabric of the neighbourhoods they inhabit and through which they traverse, as the children photograph as they move through the city. In such images we are told of their sleeping places, homes and communities, the dilapidated buildings, filthy streets and rubbish-strewn pathways that they walk each day looking for work or for somewhere to sleep, or when going to or from school or wandering in search of play. From the children of the slums of Agogobloshie, for instance, their pictures speak of living in makeshift homes and tumbledown buildings 'crowded without any sense of order' (Esth, female, 14 years old), and where 'People have also built their houses on the gutters so that the gutters are choked. When rubbish enters the gutters, they become stagnant and this is not good' (Erico, male, 15 years old). Looking at a photograph of a crumbling building, its greying concrete lower storey sprawling upwards through subsequent wooden additions, Erico continues to explain: It is one of the buildings in the area [where I live]. I wanted to show the type of materials used in building some of the structures around the area. YOK What are some of the types of materials used? Most of the houses are built with wood, so when there is any fire outbreak many Erico properties are destroyed. YOK Why can't they build with [cement] blocks? Erico I don't know. Erico This desire to document, perhaps ironically, can be at its clearest when a child feels an image fails to communicate what was intended. In one example, Mustapha (male, 14 years old) had unsuccessfully tried to tell us about the culture of marijuana smoking amongst some of the street boys. Pointing to one of his images, he explained, 'He is one of the boys, the others also are. They didn't want me to take the pictures that is why they turned their back on the camera. They knew I was going to bring the camera to CAS.'5 More frequently, their attempts to illustrate are frustrated when a camera is used beyond the limits of such a simple technology (single use, fixed lens, cameras with fast colour film containing 27 exposures and a chargeable flash), or by errors common to lay photographers (we offer no photographic training or guidance beyond providing basic operating instructions). When flicking through his photographs, Prince (male, 15 years old), clearly crestfallen, tells us of the friends, places and 'things I was going to show you' but which in around half of his photographs had been obscured by his finger dangling in front of the lens. There was disappointment for Jon (male, 13 years old), too: When we gave the camera to you and we said take any picture you want to take, what did you want to achieve with the camera? Jon I wanted to take pictures of places which affect me when I study. YOK Did you take pictures of those places? Jon Yes. But they are not in the set of pictures you took [Jon had tried to photograph YOK large open spaces in twilight using his camera's flash]. Jon Yes. YOK What were some of the places you took pictures of? Jon The video centre and the drinking spot. YOK
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YOK Why does the video centre affect you when you study? Jon A lot of noise comes from there. YOK And the drinking spot? Jon There is always loud music and other noise from those who use the place. For Jon and these other children, the intention to communicate something of their physical environment and social milieu merges into the expression of more experiential concerns, so that their description becomes inseparable from explanation, comment and reflection. On these occasions, the children's faith in the indexical qualities of a photograph merges with the communication of something less visible or immediate, with matters of experience and interpretation, as when their photography assumes a more expansive and reflexive character. In these instances their images seem to be intended as points of visual reference, the depiction of people, situations or events that precipitate, connect with or articulate broader repertoires of experience and feeling. For Mustapha (male, 14 years old), a photograph of poorly dressed boys standing around a board game, two small piles of coins and scrunched-up notes clearly visible in the evening darkness, is meant as a record of the game at hand but also as a reflection upon more general matters of existential insecurity.
FIGURE 2. Mustapha, male, 14 years old. This is the gambling spot. Most of the [street] boys come here in the night. They go and work very hard, carry loads and then come here to gamble, yet they cry when they lose their bet. [] This was late, they can gamble Mustapha all night long. Sometimes they stop at 2 or 3 [am] so when you wake them up in the morning they can't get up because they have not had enough sleep. [] YOK Do you gamble? Mustapha Yes! YOK How do you feel using your hard-earned money to gamble? Mustapha Well, sometimes you win, you can win a lot of money! YOK Do you do it every day? Mustapha No! YOK Why not?
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Because the older boys do not give us the chance to. They shove us around when they come there. Sometimes, when they come and they are Mustapha high from 'wee' [marijuana] they will take the money you have put on the board. In a parallel example we quiz Steve (male, 16 years old), another street child, on why food is such a significant theme among his pictures. In reply he explains that he wanted to 'show us' what and where he eats, and that he tries to buy his favourite food, beans and fried plantains, 'whenever I have the money'. 'The point of these photographs,' he continues, 'is that you are responsible for yourself when it comes to eating, [but that the means to achieve this is often beyond your control].' We get enough to eat on most days, but sometimes you can go hungry [] Sometimes, when we don't have enough money we have something we call 'gutter'. The gutters you see around [often open or poorly enclosed sewers running at the side of roads], when we don't have money we go looking for money there. This is because on bad days you can stand by the roadside for Steve two or three hours without getting any work to do, but you may be terribly hungry. So, we go searching for money in the gutters, when we find some coins we scrub it nicely and then use them to buy food. The problem is that often we don't even wash our hands and just begin to eat as soon as we get the food We are lucky that we don't get cholera and other diseases frequently.
'LOOKING AT ME' AND MY PICTURES

When we gave the camera to you we said you should do whatever you want to do with it, what did you want to achieve with the camera? I wanted to show my area and how I do things in my area. (Female, 14 years Vica old) YOK Vica's intention to 'show how I do things in my area' is one particular instance of a more common occurrence in which the children place themselves before the lens. In looking through the photographs there is a common movement from photographer to photographic subject as the children, in turn, charge others with picturing them at work, rest or play, or sometimes just posing for the camera. Here we find a resonance with what Chalfen (1981) has observed to be the class codes evident in the use of visual communication where, in Philadelphia at least, it is working-class (and black) children and young people who are most determined to appear on film. It is this 'look at me' ethos that Chalfen contrasts to the 'look at me see' approach of their middle-class counterparts and their investment in much more heavily aestheticised showings. Among our children the conventions of art and formal photographic practice are similarly, if unsurprisingly, absent. What characterises these images is far less rhetorical and perhaps more direct, something more akin to 'snapshot' photographs of everyday life, pictures of themselves constructed in and of the moment and without regard to, or knowledge of, artistic intent. In accepting this invitation to 'look at me' and to see 'how I do things', one must accept the need to do so with care and attention. In considering what these images may say, one of our responses has been to stress their iterative quality, where what the children 'show' individually about themselves or one another takes on additional significance with the regularity with which it is brought to our attention. Like Becker (1974), we see in this a patterning, in which a single photograph of a working child can exemplify a
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broader category of existence, the photographic communication of a characteristic class of being whose existence we have come to know of through other means (Davis 2006). In these 'look at me' photographs, the children say something of the activities that comprise their daily routines - carrying and lifting, pulling and pushing, cleaning and cooking for families and friends or in order to earn some money. Often such actions are combined with allusions to movement and activity as they are pictured walking with loads upon their heads, carrying buckets and baskets, holding market produce and clutching bags as they move up stairs and down alleys or jostle for space in crowded streets. Others are depicted bent over buckets or cooking pots or holding brushes as they sweep rooms, compounds and verandas, or wash pans and cutlery, scrub clothes, wring water from wet laundry or hang washing out to dry. Each of these images tells us of single instance, an individual moment of subjective truth, within a more pervasive economy of children's work and labour.
FIGURE 3. Vica, female, 14 years old.
FIGURE 4. Erico, male, 15 years old.
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FIGURE 5. Esth, female, 14 years old. YOK What are you doing in this picture? Erico I was helping my friends to iron. YOK What are they ironing? Erico Clothes. YOK Whose clothes? Erico That is the work they do to support themselves in school. (Male, 15 years old) Words like Erico's are required to understand what his photographs are intended to say, but those at our disposal often seem inadequate to communicate what images seem capable of expressing. Photographs cannot speak for themselves, but neither are they reducible to words - either theirs or ours - so that communicated within the frame of their photographs can be a richness and depth of understanding that at once both confirms and transcends what we have learned of these children's lives by other means. This is a quality that, in an earlier article, one of us has likened to 'triangulation plus' (Bolton, Pole, and Mizen 2001, 515): corroboration with a value-added pictorial dimension or confirmation, but in new and distinctive ways. To be told in conversation by John (male, 14 years old) that he touts for work in the local markets, fetching and carrying for traders and shoppers, is to deepen our understanding of both his life and the lives of the many others like him. But to see in his images the women market traders tending piles of onions and yams, the neatly stacked columns of plastic bottles and tin cans of cooking oil, and John carrying two large cardboard boxes of frozen fish on his head while following five paces behind the woman who has commissioned his labour is both to offer substantiation and to communicate an otherwise unascertainable topographical dimension.
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FIGURE 6. John, male, 14 years old. Some of what is presented to us in the photographs and their accompanying words we have already observed for ourselves when walking the same streets and sitting at similar places. Often, however, the children use their photography to tell us something of what is usually out of bounds by making pictures of those places they visit and people they know backstage and off-centre, as ways of telling us of lives not normally available for us to see. One such place is the footpaths and alleyways in the middle of the informal settlement adjacent to the Korle Lagoon, the centre of a community into which we have only just begun to venture. Here Erico speaks of walking home through the settlement after first being given his camera and of pausing to photograph his neighbour's children, a moment of reflection upon a journey he has undertaken many times and through which we come to know a little more of the lives of some of the other children among whom he lives. YOK Which area is this? Erico It is my area and I am heading towards my house. YOK Who are the kids in the picture? Erico They are some of the children living in my compound. They are fetching sand. YOK They are fetching sand for what? Their elder brother was doing some repairs to his room.
Erico
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FIGURE 7. Erico, male, 15 years old. Elsewhere we see, in six of Stephen's (male, 13 years old) photographs of the inside of one of the settlement's wooden shacks, the home of some of his adult friends. His images are troubling not least because they provide glimpses into what is normally the realm of the private and personal, but also because they are intended as comment on lives defined by terrible starkness. In one of these pictures the meal shared by three inhabitants constitutes a sparse affair, the diners stretched out or crouching upon stained, ill-fitting and tattered vinyl flooring, upon which rest two or three torn plastic bags from which the food is being eaten. From this and the other pictures there are few signs of belongings beyond discarded clothing and dirty cushions, and there is a conspicuous absence of fixtures and fittings - indeed, of much in the way of possessions at all. In one or two places the shack's rough plywood walls are brightened with small rectangles of colourful paper, but on the entry door the trappings of security are clear to see. When asked why he took these pictures, John responded by shrugging his shoulders as if their meaning is somehow self-evident, before adding simply that this is how people like his friends live. Similar instances of the private and personal are evident elsewhere, but these are often made as more affirmative comment on their resilience, creativity and perspicacity. For the children of the slums of Agogobloshie, we hear examples of this affirmation in the strength of their commitment to schooling amid conditions of the utmost difficulty: their school is, to our knowledge, the only one within the physical boundaries of an informal settlement providing homes to upwards of 45,000 people (Grant 2006). In discussing the images of themselves at work, they tell us of jobs sought out selling oranges, iced water, yams or doing laundry, and assisting on market stalls or vending food, so as to earn money to help their mothers to pay school fees or buy books, meals and uniforms (see Niuewenhuys 2005; Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2009). Through
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their pictures they also tell us of the determination and fortitude necessary to sustain a schooling delivered by capricious teachers and undertaken in overcrowded classrooms, where the food is unsatisfying and the air malodorous and stiflingly hot. 'That is an open space,' says Erico pointing to a photograph he had taken of a gap in the roof. 'That is why the classroom gets flooded whenever it rains.' So, too, with the demands of homework, where through their photography the children speak of their determination to complete homework begun before daybreak and without sufficient pencils, paper or books, of using makeshift desks and tables, or having to study in cramped spaces, sitting on compacted bare earth or unfinished concrete floors.
FIGURE 8. Vea, female, 13 years old. YOK This is your third picture. What is this? Vea I was studying. YOK Where was that? Outside the house [] Outside the room [in which her family of four lives]; it is Vea the storage place my mother keeps some of her things. YOK What time of the day were you studying? Vea At dawn [6 a.m.]. YOK When did you wake up? Vea 4 a.m. YOK When did you come to school? Vea 6.30 a.m. YOK When you wake up at 4 a.m., what do you do before you are ready for school? Sometimes I sweep the compound, take my bath and prepare for school, collect Vea my money and go to school. At other times I have to fetch water, but I do that in the evenings, not at dawn. (Female, 13 years old)
VOICES TO SURPRISE AND CONFOUND

If the voices that we hear through these photographs are nothing more than echoes of our own consciousness and ideology naturalised through a misplaced belief in photography's capacity to tell us something of the reality of these children's lives, then how can we account for the surprises that the children's photography invariably
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springs? Perhaps the only thing the children's photographs say with any certainty is that they will surprise, and that in our dialogues created in and around their images we will be told of the unexpected and unforeseen. This is important because to say that what we see and hear is no more than what we might want to make of it, that the voices produced through the photography are ours and not the children's, would mean that it would be impossible to explain away that element of serendipity that the children's photography regularly involves. To encounter the unanticipated through the children's photography is to underscore that the voices expressed can never be reduced to what we might wish to make of them, or that what they say is not always a consequence of the concepts or beliefs that we already hold. It is in this regular experience of being surprised, of getting things wrong and of having our expectations confounded, that we know that the children's photography express voices that are truly theirs. 'For it is precisely because the world does not yield to just any kind of expectation that we believe it exists independently of us and is not simply a figment of our imagination' (Sayer 1984, 76). In one example of this, three of Mustapha's (male, 14 years old) images depict three street boys standing in a narrow, dimly lit corridor, in various states of undress, and one boy is stepping out of his trousers. It quickly becomes clear from the following images that these boys are preparing to shower because in the following photographs they are stripped of most of their clothes, one is completely naked, and they are standing with their backs to a wall that is partially tiled. In the light from the camera's flash two feeble lines of water droplets sparkle as they fall through the air, while on the boys' bodies further droplets of water and the traces of soap are clearly visible. In a second example, two street girls produce independently of one another a similar series of photographs concerned with tented sleeping. In the first of Abena's (female, 16 years old) images we are presented with two tents fabricated from what looks like rough white sheeting, each of which is fastened to a metal shop front by two short pieces of cord. In a second image one of the tents is pictured from the front with two of its three inhabitants (we know this from Abena), arms around one another, smiling back at the camera, while in the final image of this sequence is the blurred face of her female sleeping companion pictured in extreme close-up. Pamela's (female, 14 years old) photographs depict a similar scene, only this time the tent is pictured in close-up, its sheeting held down by rocks and stones and, in a second image, a little of the interior is visible through a small tear in the grey fabric. In the last of her photographs the interior, now pictured in its entirety, is a neat but sparse arrangement comprising rough grass matting, two greying cushions and what appears to be a piece of discarded dark clothing; but it is the presence of a sleeping girl that dominates. Both of these examples seem to us instances of how the children can use their photography to tell us of things that challenge our understandings, and that what we hear and see are independent voices capable of disrupting our expectations. We have likened Mustapha's images of the bathing house to Harper's (1982) photographs of a hobo shaving, a moment of realisation that requires us to modify our assumptions and which, for us, questions accepted wisdom that sees street children possessing neither the means nor the motivation to engage in the 'body work' necessary for a modicum of health and cleanliness (Schilling 2003). So, too, with Abena's and Pamela's images of pavement living. We neither seek out nor know of this type of existence, but through their photography the children bring to us examples of ingenuity born of the experiences of extreme hardship, an instance of their resilience and creativity directed towards finding a scrap of comfort, shelter and security while living independent lives on the streets of a large and inhospitable city.
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FIGURE 9. Pamela, female, 14 years old. YOK And this picture? It shows my sleeping place [] I wanted to take a picture of the whole structure, it's a tent made from old fertilizer bags that we have joined together. We tie it in front of a store so that we will have some cover when it Pamela rains. The picture shows somebody who was sleeping; it's meant to show my sleeping place and complements the other pictures I took of the sleeping place. YOK Are you fully shielded from rain when it comes? When it rains heavily it enters the tent, but we shift positions to lie alongside Pamela the door so that we are as far away from the rain as possible. Sometimes we go to another side of the building to sleep. Since this is a shop front, it means people will be passing by as you sleep; YOK are you not afraid? That is right, but the way we have made it, it should not be possible for Pamela anybody to come there. But people come from other places like Kokomba [yam market] to steal things, shoes, clothes, or do other bad things. What we are told through photographs like these also requires us to reflect upon the errors of our knowledge. Like other social realists, we 'would argue that it is the evident fallibility of our knowledge that justifies us in believing that the world exists regardless of what we happen to think about it' (Sayer 2000, 2, original emphasis), and that in being told that we have got things wrong and in having our assumptions and theories contradicted, the voices that we hear through the children's photography cannot only be of our making. One important illustration of this is that, from early on in our research, we recognised
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the importance of friendships of the type hinted at in Abena's and Pamela's photographs of companionship around sleep. Many of the 'look at me' pictures discussed above were also clearly the product of these friendships, of having their photographs taken by friends and, importantly, reciprocating by making images of their friends in turn. As Vea (female, 13 years old) explains when asked why she took a picture of three girls, 'They are my friends and I wanted to keep a picture of them.' More significant, however, has been our growing realisation of the practical value of these friendships. In viewing their images we have encountered many images of sleep, where small groups of children scavenge for the cardboard packing cases that in other pictures they tell us are used for sleeping mats; or where they lie stretched out together on disintegrating pieces of foam rubber or rough grass matting, sometimes covered with a sheet or blanket and at other times with nothing at all. Others are pictured grouped together asleep in shop doorways or on concrete verandas, the limbs and bodies of these sleeping children visibly connected to one another as sources of support and security, as if each sleeping collective amounts to a sum greater than its individual parts. Similar themes are conveyed in their pictures of food and eating. Among the many images of street vendors, charcoal grills, gleaming metal cooking pots, assorted foodstuffs and tables stacked with provisions, we also see the children queuing with one another to buy food, waiting to be served and then pictured in the act of eating. Sometimes they eat while standing on pavements, at other times sitting on walls, in shop doorways, on stone floors or seated at the rough wooden tables. Only exceptionally is a child pictured eating alone, their photographs much more likely to include groups of two, three, four or five besides the photographer (and at times as many as nine or ten), caught in the act of passing a meal from hand to hand, or eating
from the same receptacle. FIGURE 10. Philomena, female, 14 years old. What these photographs began to communicate to us was a way of living as children that requires us to reassess what we have been told of how street children's lives are
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played out in terms of violence, isolation and abuse. Instead of childhoods defined exclusively through competitive pressures, opportunism and violence (Aptekar 1988; Hecht 1998), their photographs began to tell us of the existence of more cooperative and mutual forms of living not normally entertained in the writings about how street children live and survive. It is from beginnings in pictures like these that elsewhere we have gone on to argue for the existence of a 'sensibility of the reciprocal' (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2010) among the children who live and work on Accra's streets. Contained within images of sleeping children bound together by connected limbs and bodies or poised together over nearly empty bowls and plates having evidently just enjoyed a communal meal are suggestions of the existence of friendships created by some of the very poorest children and defined by relations of inclusiveness, exchange and mutual support, and which we have gone on to explore further by other means.
CONCLUSION
We began this article by advocating photography's role in speaking truth to power, as a means to connect our sense of the everyday with the voices and everyday reality of others. In doing so, we have sought to clarify matters of method and of what these photographic voices may be able to tell us, since it is clear that their messages are far from self-evident. We have done so through an engagement with an increasingly influential set of arguments in which there has been a retreat from the (na ve) realism of early visually inspired ethnographic practice into one in which voice and meaning are negotiated and constructed. Our response to this has been to resist its more pessimistic trajectories, where questions of voice, of what a child's photograph can mean and the messages it is capable of carrying, are ultimately held to be a product of what we as researchers choose to make of them and of the ethnographic 'fictions' that we want to write. For us this is an unsustainable position, not least because the realisation that we must confront the world through the ways that we represent it does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the children's photography is not capable of producing independent voices that tell us much of worlds beyond the realms of existing knowledge. This is certainly the intention of most of the children with whom we have undertaken our photographic research. In our account of these children's photographic voices we have emphasised an understanding of how children use their photography and in particular the purpose and intent with which they undertake their picture making, where the aim of their photography is to illustrate and observe, document, reflect and offer comment. It is with these intentions that the children look to their photographs to show us the detail and texture of their lives and to reflect upon their hopes and fears in the context of acute poverty and deprivation, but also to communicate to us something of the affirmative and of how they go about managing and recreating lives under such difficult circumstances. This role for photography, we have argued, appears most evident in how their photography communicates something that we did not know, how it communicates elements of their lives that continually surprise us and as a result of which we must revise or change our understandings. It is this fallibility in our knowledge that perhaps most of all confirms that the voices that we see and hear through the children's pictures are theirs and not ours, since what they tell us confounds our ideologies and expectations.
Notes
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[1] Our thanks to the participants in the seminar 'Emergent Seeing and Knowing: Mapping Practices of Participatory Visual Methods' (Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, Harvard University, November 2008), and to Carol Wolkowitz, Margaret Archer, Dick Chalfen, Wendy Luttrell and an anonymous referee for comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to the Research Development Fund at the University of Warwick for its initial support, and to all those who have made the research this article draws upon possible, especially the children.
[2] The article concerned is Mizen (2005), one of our first attempts to elaborate method in the use of photography with (working) children.
[3] Kids with Cameras is Briski's foundation promoting photography with children (www.kids-with-cameras.org).
[4] All names are pseudonyms. All ages are at first interview. Interviews were conducted in Twi and then transcribed and translated into English.
[5] Catholic Action for Street Children, where some of our research took place.
REFERENCES
1. Aptekar, L. (1988) Street children of Cali Duke University Press , Durham, NC 2. Archer, M. S. Archer, M. S. and Tritter, J. (eds) (2005) Homo economicus, Homo sociologicus and Homo sentiens. Rational choice theory: Resisting colonization Routledge , London 3. Becker, H. (1974) Photography and sociology. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Culture 1:1 , pp. 3-26. [ crossref ] 4. Bolton, A. , Pole, C. and Mizen, P. (2001) Picture this: Researching child workers. Sociology 35:2 , pp. 501-518. [ crossref ] 5. Boyden, J. and Hart, J. (2007) The statelessness of the world's children. Children and Society 24:4 , pp. 237-248. [ crossref ] 6. Briski, Z. (2004) Born into brothels: Photographs by the children of Calcutta Umbrage Editions , New York 7. Chalfen, R. (1981) A sociovidistic approach to children's filmmaking: The Philadelphia Project. Visual Communication 7:1 , pp. 2-32. 8. Chaplin, E. (1994) Sociology and visual representation Routledge , London [ crossref ] 9. Davis, M. (2006) Planet of slums Verso , London [ crossref ] 10. Grant, R. (2006) Out of place? Global citizens in local spaces: A study of the informal settlements in the Korle lagoon environs in Accra, Ghana. Urban Forum 17 , pp. 1-24. [ crossref ] 11. Harper, D. (1982) Good company Chicago University Press , Chicago
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12. Harper, D. Prosser, Jon (ed) (1998) An argument for visual sociology. Image-based research: A sourcebook for qualitative researchers RoutledgeFalmer , London 13. Hecht, T. (1998) At home in the street: Street children of northeast Brazil Cambridge University Press , Cambridge 14. Mizen, P. (2005) A little light work? Children's images of their labour. Visual Studies 20:2 , pp. 124-139. [informaworld] 15. Mizen, P. and Ofosu-Kusi, Y. (2009) A talent for living: Exploring Ghana's 'new' urban childhood. Children and Society. Under review 16. Mizen, P. and Ofosu-Kusi, Y. (2010) Asking, giving, receiving: Friendship as survival strategy among Accra's street children. Childhood 17:4 , pp. 1-14. [ crossref ] 17. Nieuwenhuys, O. Qvortrup, Jens (ed) (2005) The wealth of children: Reconsidering the child labour debate. Studies in modern childhood: Structure, agency, culture Palgrave , Basingstoke 18. Pink, S. (2001) Doing visual ethnography Sage , London 19. Piper, H. and Frankham, J. (2007) Seeing voices and hearing pictures: Image as discourse and the framing of image-based research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28:3 , pp. 373-387. 20. Roberts, H. Christensen, P. and James, A. (eds) (2008) Listening to children: And hearing them. Researching with children: Perspectives and practices Routledge , London 21. Salgado, S. Light, K. (ed) (2000) Workers. Witness in our time: Working lives of documentary photographers Smithsonian Books , Washington 22. Sayer, A. (1984) Method in social science: A realist approach Routledge , London [ crossref ] 23. Sayer, A. (2000) Realism and social science Sage , London 24. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992) Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil University of California Press , Berkeley 25. Schilling, C. (2003) The body and social theory 2nd, Sage , London
List of Figures
FIGURE 1. Rob, male, 16 years old.
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FIGURE 2. Mustapha, male, 14 years old.
FIGURE 3. Vica, female, 14 years old.
FIGURE 4. Erico,
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male, 15 years old.
FIGURE 5. Esth, female, 14 years old.
FIGURE 6. John, male, 14 years old.
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FIGURE 7. Erico, male, 15 years old.
FIGURE 8. Vea, female, 13 years old.
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FIGURE 9. Pamela, female, 14 years old.
FIGURE 10. Philomena, female, 14 years old.
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