Lively Entanglements: The Doings, Movements and Enactments of Photography

Abstract

Working with a camera means engaging with an already troubled material and photography's history of voyeurism, othering, and violence. The language and conventions of photography tend to emphasize images that are ‘captured’ and a gaze that objectifies. However, in discussing a photography project that took place over several months at a Canadian early childhood center, this article explores what it might mean not to erase the camera's voyeuristic gaze and photography's colonial histories, but to play with them. In improvising with the camera we engage in a world, not of subjects and objects, binaries of perceiver and perceived, but rather various materialities, material relations, compositions, intra-actions and lively entanglements.