Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

The expansion of smartphone ownership has expanded the spread of photography. With their integrated cameras, anyone with a smartphone has a camera in their hand. Increasingly, these owners are children. In the UK, for example, 99% of 15-year-olds own a smartphone, and even 25% of three-year-olds. Children have therefore become photographic image-makers like never before.

That phrase ‘never before’ assumes that we know how children took photographs in the past, but I found surprisingly little research on the subject. I have long examined the history of photography. I knew that major camera companies, such as Kodak, once the largest of them all, promoted cheap and simple-to-operate cameras to children from 1900, most famously with their Box Brownie that featured a cheeky imp character on its packaging. Via enormous advertising campaigns in the early twentieth century, Kodak showed smiling children, barely out of toddlerhood, with cameras in their hands. Their catchphrase, ‘Let the Children Kodak’, suggested that children were desperate to become photographers if only adults would support their ambitions by buying them a camera. In the decades that followed, cameras frequently featured as prizes for children in competitions or as promotional giveaways. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, at least in the UK, the majority of the population had a camera in the house. But what did children do with those cameras? What photos did they take? What did they look like? And, if I could find them, what might they tell us about the children’s visions and children’s worlds? What might such a history tell us about where we are today?

Those are the questions that underpin Whippersnappers: How Children Became Photographers, published by Four Corners Books in September 2026, and the companion exhibition, Snap Happy! at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, running from 14 October 2026 to 21 February 2027.

Whippersnappers traces what children did with cameras from the 1880s to the digital revolution. It begins with the most privileged of young photographers: the sons of the nobility and the wealthy attending British fee-paying private schools, who instituted miniature versions of gentlemanly photographic societies at the end of the nineteenth century. With access to scientific training and fragile, complex and expensive equipment, they learned the aesthetic and technical rules of Pictorialism, a style of picture-making that emphasised the rural, timeless and charming in subject matter, using painterly styles of composition and printing. Or, I should say, they were instructed in these approaches, but they didn’t always carry them out.

Boys’ photographic societies were rules-based structures designed to inculcate discipline and regulate the unruly. The reality was often rather different. Boys failed to complete their assignments, they ran riot once out of the school gates, they mucked about in class. In the holidays, homesick boys took pictures of their friends and family even though this was discouraged; they preferred to depict their pets and prized possessions rather than picturesque waterfalls and historic architecture. They furtively photographed their teachers unawares. Badly behaved boys were banned from photographic premises but broke in anyway. They stole club subscriptions, smashed camera lenses and, in one case, burned down the darkroom. Photographic club cultures for children were, in practice, very different to how they looked on paper. This opening example sets the scene for the chapters that follow, where I examine the rhetoric of photographic benefit espoused by photography’s promoters (teachers, club leaders, guidebook authors, the photographic industry) for over a century, and the way that generations of children made photography anew, in their own image.

Ongoing thread. More from Annebella Pollen to follow.