Pasia, Despina; (2024) Children's Encounters with Historical Photographic Images in the Republic of Cyprus. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

State schools and museums are the main contexts where children in the Republic of Cyprus encounter historical photographs of the island. In both contexts photographs comply with three dominant photographic narratives of nationalism, suffering and romanticism. Although extensively present, such paradigmatic photographs have been both „naturalised‟ and systematically overlooked, becoming largely invisible, thus often evading critical discussion. This research brings children‟s encounters with historical photographs to the foreground. More specifically, it seeks to understand children‟s experiences of encountering second generation prints of photographs of people I selected from a local museum collection which both run counter to and comply with dominant narratives about Cyprus. The study focuses on sixteen children, Cypriot and migrant, aged eleven to thirteen years old who attended the Nicosia school where I was teaching in 2017. Drawing theoretically and methodologically from childhood studies, hermeneutic phenomenology, attention and photography theory, I examine the experiences through interview data and to a lesser extent through photobooks, both generated when children were prompted to select photographs of people they found interesting. In order to convey the richness and complexity of the encounter I include a narrative description utilizing composite verbal statements from the interviews. Applying Max van Manen‟s phenomenological existentials of lived space, lived-body, lived-time and lived-human relations (1990) I then offer an interpretation of the experiences as „turning towards‟ and „attending to‟ specific photographs and elements therein. Findings reveal the experiencing of photographic images as interfaces between the historical snapshot and children‟s own lives unpacking the multiplicities of children‟s lifeworlds in the fluid social and cultural setting of a Mediterranean country. The thesis therefore argues for letting go of context-related concerns and instead employing historical photographs to enable children‟s translocational positionalities to unfold and be articulated.

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