aitken1993

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Self-Directed Photoyapby 65 
Serow, W J. 1987. Why the elderly move: Cross-na- 
tional comparisons. Research on Aging 9582-97. 
Svart, L. M. 1976. Environmental preference migra- 
tion. Geographical Review 66:3 15-30. 
Uniformed Services Almanac, Inc. 1989. Retired 
Militaly Almanac. Falls Church, VA: Uniformed 
Services Almanac, Inc. 
U.S. Postal Service. 1989. Data file of post office 
ZIP codes, with state, city, and county names. 
Washington, DC: U.S. Postal Service. 
Voss, l? R., R. J. Gunderson, and R. Manchin. 1988. 
Death taxes and elderly interstate migration. Re- 
search on Aging 10:420-50. 
Wiseman, R. E, and C. C. Koseman. 1979. A typol- 
ogy of elderly migration based on the decision 
making process. Economic Geography 55:324-37. 
CHARLES L. JACKSON (M.A.G., Southwest 
Texas State University) is a retired U.S. Atr Force 
lieutenant colonel. 
FKEDERICK A. DAY (Ph.D., Ohio State Univer- 
sity) is Associate Professor in the Department of 
Geography and Planning at Southwest ‘lexas State 
University, San Marcos, TX 78666. His research 
interests include social and population geography. 
A Preliminary Study of the Self-Directed Photography of 
Middle-class, Homeless, and Mobility-Impaired Children* 
Stuart C. Aitken and Joan Wingate 
Sun Diego State University 
Understanding the ways in which children with different life experiences come to terms with day-to-day contexts 
and constraints has become an important topic of social science research. This study applies the technique of 
auto-photography to the study of children-environment transactions. How children apprehend their environments 
is described through a leitmotif analysis and an interpretation of photographs taken by children from middle-class 
families, homeless children, and children whose mobility is impaired by cerebral palsy. We speculate upon the social 
and physical contexts of these children based upon the images that they selected to photograph. Although 
impressionistic, our findings suggest the importance of auto-photography as a method for uncovering children- 
environment transactions. Key Words: children, auto-photography, context, diversity. 
ddren’s personal geographies are differ- Ch‘ ent from those of adults to the extent that 
we, as adults, rarely discern the nuances that 
comprise the worlds of children. A child’s day 
can be prolonged by a thirst for knowledge in 
environments that adults find mundane and 
commonplace. Children see things in these 
environments that we have forgotten how to 
look for, let alone understand. Recent studies 
suggest that adult-controlled laboratory tests 
which focus upon a child’s abilities with passive 
stimuli cannot hope to capture the richness of 
the child’s everyday understanding of herlhis 
world. Spencer et al. (1989) determined that 
many standardized experimental designs in- 
adequately assess children’s abilities and poten- 
tials in real-world environments. They cite 
studies which have shown children to be ex- 
ceptionally adaptable to different environ- 
ments and ingenious in the ways that they 
modify their worlds to suit their own needs 
(cf. Hart 1979; Katz 1986; Aitken and 
*The authors would like to thank the June Burnett Foundation and the San Diego University Foundation for funding parts of this project. 
The staff and adminisuation of the San Diego Children’s Museum, Schweitzer Elementary School, and the St. Kncent de Pauwoan Kroc 
Center were very helpful with the “Childrm’s Geographies of San Diego” project of which this study is a part. Also, two anonymous review- 
ers made extremely insightful comments on an early draft o f this paper. Finally, a very special thanks goes to Susan Mains, the independent 
rater on our leimtsnf code. 
Professional Geographer, 45(1) 1993, pages 65-72 0 Copyright 1993 by Association of American Geographers 
Initial submission, September 1991; revised Submission, June 1992; final acceptance, August 1992. 
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 23R Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 IJF, UK. 
66 Volume 45, Number 1, Febmnry I993 
Ginsberg 1988). Surely our ways of knowing 
how different children characterize their envi- 
ronment should be sensitive to the contexts of 
their daily lives, using methods which facilitate 
environmental competence and personal iden- 
The primary focus of this paper is methodo- 
logical. We explore the technique of auto-pho- 
tography (Ziller 1990), or self-directed pho- 
tography, as a way to empower children’s 
fascination with images and photographs so 
that they may document ways in which they 
transact with their environment. Geographic 
content in these images is suggested by se- 
lected objects, persons, and symbols which 
provide a cognitive map of the child’s local area 
upon which personal points of reference are 
mapped (Ziller and Rorer 1985, 628). This 
paper is a report on some preliminary research 
which applies the technique of auto-photogra- 
phy to questions of how children from con- 
trasting social backgrounds and with different 
physical abilities apprehend their local, every- 
day environment. As yet, the influence of the 
different personal, social, cultural and environ- 
mental contexts of children’s lives is a relatively 
understudied topic (cf. Sell 1985; Gergen et al. 
1990; Katz 1991). Our study comprises chil- 
dren from “middle-class” families, children 
from homeless families, and children with 
cerebral palsy. The rationale for looking a t 
these particular children is based upon a belief 
that the three groups represent children who 
relate to their environments in very different 
ways because of the fundamental contexts of 
their daily lives. 
The paper begins with a description of self- 
directed photography, along with a brief com- 
ment on a theoretical grounding for this 
method in the postmodern notion of “images 
as text.” Data created during a “photo-jour- 
ney” are then described using a leitmotzj’coding 
system which we developed in concert with the 
children. Sets of images which characterize dis- 
similar child-environment transactions are de- 
rived from this practical exercise. Given the 
exploratory basis of our work, we do not at- 
tempt to “explain” the differences between the 
groups of children, and we do not intend to 
generalize our findings to any specific popula- 
tion of children. Instead, we speculate upon the 
social and physical contexts of some distinctive 
child-environment transactions which we en- 
countered with this study. 
tity. 
Photographic Representations of 
The Self 
Although the use of photo-observation in so- 
cial science may be traced back to Bateson and 
Mead’s (1942) classic study of Balinese culture, 
contemporary critics now suggest that these 
representations may say more about the eth- 
nographer than they do about the other (Rabi- 
now 1980). Photographic representation of the 
self has its origin in Worth’s study of the 
Navajo (Worth 1964, 1981). By turning the 
camera over to his subjects, Worth empowered 
the Navajo to act out and produce images of 
their world exposed to their method of ques- 
tioning. Worth’s work established photogra- 
phy as a discourse between the photographer, 
the subject of the photograph, and the viewer 
(researcherhdience). 
Chalfen (1974, 1987) expanded Worth’s ap- 
proach with a series of studies in which lower- 
and middle-class teenagers made “socio-docu- 
mentaries.” He found that the lower-class 
groups took more photographs of themselves 
and their friends (in activities such as sports, 
fighting, drinking), whereas the middle-class 
children focused upon scenes of nature, ani- 
mals, and inanimate objects. In another study, 
Damico (1985) discovered that African-Ameri- 
can children were more likely than European- 
Americans to take social-orientedphoto- 
graphs. Related experimental work by develop- 
mental psychologists such as Shade (1982) sug- 
gests that the socialization experiences of Afri- 
can-Americans causes them to focus on people 
stimuli rather than objects because this affords 
an advantage in the types of social and inter- 
personal situations that they are likely to en- 
counter. Werner (1979) proposes that white 
middle-class children are more “secure” in 
their personal environments than children in 
other American subcultures, and they are thus 
more likely to take note of the physical envi- 
ronment. Studies such as these are clearly 
open to criticism in that the relationships be- 
tween race, class, ethnicity, and child develop- 
ment are extremely complex. This makes it 
difficult to tie experimental outcomes to any 
simple set of “independent” variables. More- 
over, the conjectures of Werner (1979) and 
Shade (1982) are based exclusively upon data 
created through the administration of various 
types of psychological instruments such as per- 
sonality measures, attitude scales, and percep- 
Self-Directed Photography 67 
tual tests. Tests such as these tend not to rep- 
resent the active engagement of children with 
their environments. The current study follows 
Chalfen (1974) and Damico (1985) in that it 
enables children to create images of themselves 
in their own environments. Before turning to 
the contexts of the children in the current 
study, we provide a brief theoretical basis for 
using self-directed photography as a research 
tool. 
Ziller and his colleagues refined and sim- 
plified Worth’s auto-photographic approach by 
providing subjects with instamatic cameras and 
asking them to take photographs to express 
“who are you?” (Ziller and Rorer 1985; Ziller 
et al. 1988). Ziller and Smith (1977) elaborated 
upon a phenomenological basis for auto-pho- 
tography whereby the photographic images 
produced by a subject provide an intuitive pre- 
sentation of the ways phenomena appear. Al- 
though he does not articulate it as such, Ziller’s 
approach uses auto-photographic “images as 
texts” to improve interpersonal communica- 
tion and understanding. 
The postmodern notion of “images as text” 
follows the works of Barthes (1987) and some 
contemporary cultural anthropologists (Clif- 
ford 1986; Rabinow 1986) and geographers 
(Barnes and Duncan 1992) which incorporate 
as texts many different types of cultural pro- 
ductions such as paintings, maps, and land- 
scapes, as well as photographic images. Barthes 
was one of the first theorists to decipher soci- 
ety’s “images” and to reveal the importance of 
understanding the everyday cultural landscape 
through means other than language.’ Many 
postmodern theorists suggest that the self has 
become a sign of itself, a double reflection 
anchored in texts on the one side, and everyday 
life on the other (Denzin 1991, viii). Thus, 
images as text become an apprehension of re- 
ality rather than mere referential duplications. 
Jameson (1984, 90-91) traces this latter theo- 
retical position from the work of Lacan (1978) 
and Althusser (1971) who theorize an impor- 
tant connection between a person’s imaginary 
relationship and his or her real conditions of 
existence. Lacan, in particular, conveys the ex- 
treme opposition between the signification of 
texts and the constitution of the real when he 
describes it as a choice between meaning and 
life (Lacan 1978). Jameson (1984, 90) is par- 
ticularly intrigued with Lynch’s (1 960) cognitive 
mapping as a basis for understanding a situ- 
ational representation (an “image”) on the part 
of the individual to a “vaster and properly un- 
representable totality.” Self-directed photogra- 
phy, then, may be viewed as a cognitive map- 
ping which serves to reaffirm the self by 
partially apprehending the real. 
The Children‘s Photo-Journey 
Contexts 
Our study was conducted in collaboration with 
San Diego’s Children’s Museum. “Middle- 
class” (n = 14) children signed up for a “photo- 
journey” as part of an educational program run 
by the museum. The program was then ex- 
tended to children at the St. Vincent de 
Paul/Joan Kroc Center for homeless families 
(n = 13), and to children with cerebral palsy 
who attended San Diego’s Schweitzer Elemen- 
tary School for children with special needs 
(n = 14).2 All the children in the program 
were aged between six and 14 years. The se- 
lection of these groups was inspired, a t least 
partly, from the work of Damico (1985) and 
Chalfen (1 974). We wanted to go beyond their 
focus on the photographs of children from 
distinct social and cultural backgrounds by also 
including children whose lives were circum- 
scribed by a special physical context, mobility 
impairment. 
We accompanied each child on a photo- 
journey of their local residential en~ironment.~ 
The duration of the photo-journey was usually 
about one hour and 30 minutes, all were taken 
at about the same time during the day, and 
none were scheduled during adverse environ- 
mental conditions such as rain. All the children 
were given the same instructions on how to use 
a Fuji disposable camera. The following verbal 
prompts were given to each child: (1) “We 
want you to describe to yourself how you see 
yourself in your local area. To do this we would 
like you to take (or have someone else take) 24 
photographs so that if someone else saw your 
photos, they’d know about you and your local 
area . . .”; ( 2 ) “One of us will be with you when 
you take the photos, so that we can record your 
route and where you take each photograph 
. . .”; (3) “These photographs can be anything 
just as long as they tell us something about you 
and your local area . . .”; (4) “Keep in mind 
that the photographs should describe you and 
your environment as you see them . . .”; (5) “We 
are not interested in your skill as a photogra- 
48 Volume 45, Number I, February 1993 
pher . . .”; and (6) “When we meet you back 
a t the museum/center/school, you will create a 
photo-collage which tells other people about 
you and your local area using the photographs 
you took and some magazine photographs that 
you select.” The collages were to bring closure 
to the program for the children but, as we will 
show, they also revealed some important mean- 
ings in the photographs which remained un- 
covered by our interviews with the children. 
Moreover, the collages afforded a nonlinear 
medium for each child to create a “picture 
story” which presented “The Perfect Place for 
Kids.” 
Paraphrasing Auto-Photographic 
Images 
Photographic images are “infinitely describ- 
able” because they contain immense amounts 
of information and, as such, a multiplicity of 
coding categories could be constructed for 
each of the children’s photographs. Nonethe- 
less, we developed a leimotifcode which rep- 
resented an aggregation of the children’s 
photographs. In developing the categories 
of the code we consulted the children dur- 
ing the photo-journey and at the stage of the 
collage-making. The final code comprised 142 
hierarchical categories of which the primary 
categories reflect Ziller’s (1990) principal ori- 
entations: “built and natural environment,” 
“social relations,” and “dynami~/action.”~ 
Table 1 reflects our interpretation for the 
primary emphases of the photographs, cross- 
tabulated by the three principal classes and by 
each of the child groups. We use this analysis 
merely as a preliminary basis for understanding 
the children’s apprehension of their environ- 
ments. Much of our discussion below is in- 
formed by how the children re-presented their 
photographs during interviews and when mak- 
ing their collages. 
The children with cerebral palsy were very 
dependent upon siblings and parents. In most 
cases they could notmove around their local 
environment unaccompanied. Perhaps this 
mobility impairment helped to foster what ap- 
peared to us as intimate links among family 
members. This orientation is strongly reflected 
in the numerous photographs of family mem- 
bers. The homeless children also took numer- 
ous photographs of social relations. In many 
cases, these children went to considerable ef- 
Table I Photographs Cross-Tabulated by Child 
Group and Principal Leitmotif Class 
Leitmotif Class 
Social Dynamic1 Environment 
Child Group Built Natural Relations Action 
Middle-class 242 
(n = 14) 192 50 10 11 
Homeless 124 
(n = 13) 107 17 84 12 
(n = 14) 151 21 60 45 
Cerebral Palsy 172 
Degrees offreedm = 4. 
Chi-Square = 122.62. 
Signrficant at p c 0.001. 
fort to make sure friends and staff members 
were around during the photo-journey sessions 
so that they could have them pose. 
The children with cerebral palsy took a dis- 
proportionate number of dynamidaction pho- 
tographs. The 45 photographs in this category 
(Table 1) reflect a principal emphasis for all but 
five of the children with cerebral palsy, a much 
higher proportion than in either of the other 
two groups. The dynamic/action photographs 
were primarily of other children in play- 
grounds, playing ball, or riding bikes, activities 
in which the children with cerebral palsy would 
never be able to participate fully. When asked 
about this, one child commented that partici- 
pation as an observer was often just as good as 
joining in because the other children would 
sometimes go out of their way to shout com- 
ments or ask advice of her. Sometimes she kept 
score in a game, elevating her role to that of 
an active participant. On another photo-jour- 
ney, one of the wheelchair-bound children 
asked one of us to take a picture of himself 
beside a horse-shaped swing because it seemed 
to him that it was a particular favorite of other 
children. 
An orientation towards objects in the built 
and natural environment is reflected in many 
of the photographs of the middle-class chil- 
dren. The middle-class children took nearly 
three times more photographs which included 
the natural environment (trees, shrubs, etc.) 
than either of the other two groups. Of course, 
the lives of the middle-class children are much 
less circumscribed in space than those of the 
homeless children who are limited by the rules 
of the center and the children with cerebral 
palsy who are limited by their mobility impair- 
ment and dependence on others. 
Self-Directed Photography 69 
Table 2 documents the most frequently re- 
corded orientations at the most specific level of 
the leitmotifcode. All these orientations were 
photographed a t least six times by members of 
each group. Shops and malls are prominent 
contexts for all three groups of children. For 
the children with cerebral palsy, these photo- 
graphs often include salesclerks (some of 
whom knew the children by their first names). 
Cerebral palsy is usually a noticeable disability 
and adults-from kindness or sympathy- 
often go out of their way to help these chil- 
dren. Nearly all the children with cerebral 
palsy had strong orientations towards their 
yards (usually the only place outside of the 
home where they could go unaccompanied). 
One boy took pictures of all the different areas 
of his backyard where he played. Regular paths 
(sidewalks, ramps, paved access, and so forth) 
and parking lots were commonly photo- 
graphed by the wheelchair-bound children. 
When asked about this orientation, several of 
the children reported the ease with which they 
could traverse a parking lot in a wheelchair. In 
addition, nearly all of the children with cere- 
bral palsy took photographs of parents’ cars or 
vans (Table 2). Some wanted to be photo- 
graphed beside the vehicle or even, in one case, 
operating a wheelchair lift into a van. For these 
children, a parent’s vehicle constitutes an im- 
portant orientation because it provides a form 
of mobility and an opportunity to get beyond 
a limited home-range. Animals were photo- 
graphed fairly frequently, but they seemed to 
hold a special significance for the children with 
cerebral palsy (Table 2). Most of these children 
had pets of some kind or they played with 
neighbors’ cats and dogs. 
It is clear from Table 2 that social relations 
dominate the frequently photographed con- 
texts of homeless children. All the children 
took at least three photographs of friends or 
groups posing. The built environment is most 
often portrayed by these children as general 
panoramas and pictures of their schoolyard, 
the street, and the St. Vincent de PaullJoan 
Kroc Center’s courtyard. They do not focus on 
specific items such as plants, trees, paths, or 
shops. One is tempted to conclude that the 
physical environment is less a context and 
more a stage for their social activities. Of 
course, a conclusion of this kind must be de- 
scribed as exploratory and impressionistic. 
Nonetheless, it resonates a t least somewhat 
with other studies which indicate that the so- 
cialization experiences of low-income children 
cause them to focus more on people stimuli than 
on objects (Chalfen 1974; Shade 1982; Damico 
1985). The implication is that children in sub- 
cultures such as these have to continuously 
come to terms with interpersonal issues. Phil- 
lips et al. (1986) report that the profiles of the 
children who reside at the Urban Family Cen- 
ter in New York reflect a stressful home situ- 
ation: 26% had academic difficulty a t school; 
18% fought a lot with siblings; and 15% had 
temper tantrums. They indicate that these so- 
cial and behavioral problems are related di- 
rectly to the instability of the children’s social 
environment but go on to suggest that it is 
much to their credit that these families have 
held together under adverse circumstances, 
Table 2 Most Frequently Photographed Orientations of Child Groups* 
Middle-class Homeless Cerebral-Palsy 
street mall/shops street 
school exterior panorama (built environment) yard 
house (general) one person (posing) mall/shops 
malllshops friends (posing) parent’s car 
recreation center group (posing) 
tree beach house 
. . . . . . . . one person (posing) 
grocery shop one person (not posing) panorama (built environment) 
own house 
yard 
playground author and friends (posing) author and friends (posing) 
pondllake 
neighbor’s house park grocery shop 
built environment schoolyard own house 
friend’s house neighbor’s house 
secret paths pet/animal 
bushes parking lots 
parent’s car 
“Orientation listed in decreasing frequency of occurrence, Orientations above dashed lines were pr imly emphases on at kart 12 photo- 
graphs. 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 
courtyard of center others playing 
others playing fast-food restaurant 
group (not posing) recreation center 
regular paths 
70 Volume 45, Number 1, Februav 1993 
that they usually want to change those circum- 
stances, and that the children often shoulder 
such mature responsibilities. 
The aggregate views we have just described 
hide many personal and symbolic meanings 
that were brought to our attention during the 
photo-journeys and after, when the children 
constructed their collages. It is to a discussion 
of these that we now turn. In several instances, 
portrayal of the built environment symbolized 
a social relationship. Photographs of a friend’s 
home, for example, might represent an impor- 
tant social relation. One wheelchair-bound boy 
took a photograph of a house where another 
boy with cerebral palsy lived. This association 
with another child who also had cerebral palsy 
seemed very important. Many of the children 
who lived in apartments took photographs of 
recreation centersand playground equipment 
within their complexes. Local neighborhood 
parks were also frequently photographed con- 
texts. The images did not symbolize the built 
environment but rather a place where the child 
got together with friends. A photograph of a 
hairdressing salon symbolized a particular ac- 
tivity for one boy, but it was also a place where 
the child had a special friend in the woman 
who cut his hair. These findings support Sell’s 
(1985, 41) contention that places often are val- 
ued by children because special adults lived or 
worked there, or because of opportunities for 
social gatherings. 
A girl with cerebral palsy took a picture of 
three large boulders which, ostensibly, would 
be coded as “natural environment.” In fact, the 
boulders reminded her of the sea, and a grand- 
mother who lived in Oregon. A middle-class 
girl and a wheelchair-bound boy took photo- 
graphs of recycling bins and garbage cans re- 
spectively. These were then put on prominent 
display in their collages in order to “make a 
statement” that reflected values which they had 
learned at school. A photograph which might 
be coded as “sidewalk” was, in fact, a depiction 
of some strange hieroglyphics painted on the 
sidewalk which a middle-class boy had spent 
time deciphering as the location of gas and 
electric utility lines beneath the surface. Many 
of the middle-class and cerebral palsy children 
took pictures of sueet-name signs to symbolize 
a place that was particularly important to them. 
The sign signified an affirmation of a familiar 
street rather than a landmark for wayfinding. 
A seven-year-old Vietnamese boy with cerebral 
palsy whose immigrant family lived in an ex- 
tremely poor neighborhood in San Diego took 
many photographs of flowering plants and 
bushes because they represented “the only 
beautiful things in the neighborhood.” Some 
dense undergrowth was photographed and la- 
beled as a scary place for one middle-class child 
because she had been told that it was full of 
illegal migrants. Another middle-class girl took 
a photograph of a canyon where she occasion- 
ally went with friends. The photograph sym- 
bolized independence because she felt that if 
her parents knew they would not approve of 
her going to the canyon. 
Hidden dynamic/action meanings were par- 
ticularly prevalent. For one middle-class boy, a 
photograph taken of a bank did not symbolize 
a financial institution but the “boring place 
where I have to wait for my mum while she 
gets money for the groceries.” A stop sign a t 
the end of the street symbolized the home- 
range of a wheelchair-bound child; it was as far 
as the child could go and still be within viewing 
distance of the family home. A concrete con- 
duit was photographed by a middle-class boy 
because it was a particularly thrilling skate- 
board area. A 10-year-old boy photographed 
parts of his four-mile jogging trail. Jogging this 
distance represented an important achieve- 
ment and the establishment of self-identity. 
The same boy took a photograph of a picture 
of himself while public speaking as part of a 
campaign for school president. At the shopping 
mall, several of the homeless children took 
photographs of “bums,” whom they later 
mocked. The children considered their own 
situation to be far removed from the context 
of these homeless people. 
Concluding Remarks 
We are only beginning to understand which 
kinds of environments foster competence, 
creativity, independence, self-awareness, be- 
longingness, and social skills in our children. 
It is also clear that we need to address more 
issues of difference and diversity in geographi- 
cal research. It is not enough to distinguish 
between groups such as children, adults, and 
old people; we must also understand different 
contexts within these groups which might re- 
late to class, ethnicity, race, or disability. Our 
study touches upon some of these differences 
among children, but it is exploratory and our 
Self-Dzrected Pbotogvapby 71 
findings are impressionistic a t best. It is be- 
yond our scope to suggest in what ways a 
child’s development will reflect a particular 
context, but it is clear that we need to under- 
stand this link. 
Middle-class children in our study took 
many photographs which focused directly 
upon the physical environment. This focus 
may reflect these children’s freedom to move 
around and explore their local areas. Such ac- 
tivities foster independence and self-awareness, 
attributes reflected in many of these children’s 
photographs. The children with cerebral palsy 
had a strong, and impelling, orientation to- 
wards the dynamic activities of other children. 
Although these children could never partici- 
pate fully in these activities, this orientation 
shows a desire to be like other children and to 
be accepted as part of a group. These children’s 
dependence on others for their own mobility 
is reflected also in their orientation towards 
family members and vehicles. The physical en- 
vironment appears as a secondary backdrop for 
the social orientations of our homeless chil- 
dren. Other observers of homeless families in 
shelters have commented chat- the children 
often shoulder mature social responsibilities 
(cf. Phillips et al. 1986; Powell 1991) which 
opens up questions related to how these chil- 
dren apprehend nature and society. The chil- 
dren we talked to at the St. Vincent de 
Paul/Joan Kroc Center had little opportunity 
to get away from others, or for creative explo- 
ration outside of the center. 
We ground social science, now, on moving 
foundations. There is no longer any place of 
overview from which to map human ways of 
life (Clifford 1986, 22) . What we have con- 
structed here is as much of our own making as 
it is the making of the children. What arises 
are important questions related to how we 
study children and what constitutes an appro- 
priate representation of child-environment 
transactions. Self-directed photography offers 
one, partial and somewhat contrived, window 
on the images that comprise the everyday 
worlds of children. H 
Notes 
‘It is impossible to do justice to the complexity of 
Barthes’s work in this space but Duncan and Duncan 
(1992) provide an excellent description of its rela- 
tionship to landscape studies. In addition, much of 
the posunodern literature on the relationship be- 
tween images and society is summarized in Denzin 
(1 99 1). 
’The larter group of children have in common some 
form of dysfunction of the neuromotor or neuro- 
muscular systems that has resulted from a nonpro- 
gressive brain abnormality for which the onset was 
before, at, or shortly after the time of birth (Hardy 
1983). The disorder may be so mild that the person 
affected has only a barely discernible lack of control 
of a limb, or so severe that the person is almost 
completely helpless. None of the 14 children who 
were part of our program fell into this last category, 
although all had some significant form of mobility 
impairment (eight were wheelchair bound, three 
needed special crutches, and two could walk only 
with leg braces). None of the children had severe 
communication disorders. 
3The “residential” context of the homeless children 
was quite different from the other children in that 
their lives were closely circumscribed by the center’s 
rules and regulations. Families have their own rooms 
in a large three-storey Spanish-style building which 
surrounds a spacious interior courtyard. In the 
mornings, the children attend a special State-run 
school which is adjacent to the center. In the after- 
noons, educational programs and group outings for 
the children are supervised by volunteers. The eve- 
nings are usually free time although the children are 
not allowed to leave the center. 
4Details on the developmentof the hierarchical leit- 
motif code are available from the authors. Each 
author independently assessed the children’s photo- 
graphs three times, once for each set of hierarchical 
codes representing “built and namral environment,” 
“social relations,” and “dynamidaction.” We also 
asked someone who had no involvement with the 
project to independently rate all the photographs. 
Where possible, each rater identified which category 
seemed to be a photograph’s primary Orientation. 
We then established three N x 142 matrices for 
every child (one for each of the ratings) in which 
rows reflected the leitmotifcode and columns com- 
prised the photographs (N) taken by the child. In 
total, 881 photographs were analyzed in this way. At 
the first level of the code (represented in Table 1) 
there was 100% agreement between our three raters. 
At the fourth and most specific level of the code 
there was a 66.29% correspondence between cate- 
gorizations. 
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STUART C. AITKEN is Associate Professor in the 
Department of Geography, San Diego State Univer- 
sity, San Diego, CA 92182. His research interests are 
in children’s geographies, gender relations, commu- 
nity and neighborhood change, and the geography 
of film. 
JOAN WINGATE received her masters degree in 
1991 from the Department of Geography, San Di- 
ego State University. She currently works for Brian 
E Mooney and Associates, an environmental con- 
sultant agency in San Diego, and she teaches part- 
time in the Department of Geography, San Diego 
State University. Her research interests include 
water resource management and feminist geography.