‘Say cheese!’ exploring consent and performance in the 'shutter moment' of School Photo Day

School Photo Day (2020) was an art intervention as research method, made in the context of a transdisciplinary project exploring children’s experiences of school. Artist researchers invited junior school children to work with them to make portraits of themselves, in a process that closely emulated the prosaic school photograph day experience that is common in the UK. The co-production of a photo with each participant resulted in a printed image delivered to their carers. School Photo Day (2020) facilitated a ‘stage’ or ‘set’ for a collaborative performance, where children negotiated ‘making themselves’ in a space of complex power relations and representation, where peer relationships, the time-space of school, and the surrounding community of carers and families entangled. We asked how this method could bring new attunement and sensitivity to the way school life constructs children, and in turn how they feel at school.

The ethical standards required by University research, including the requirement for informed consent, data protection, and appropriate risk management approach for participants and researchers were followed fastidiously. We were also supported by the standard processes to manage consent and privacy that Uk schools follow. Our framework for the activity – emulating a known event - allowed a degree of predictability and intention. However, in practice, the triple identity and purpose of the work (as a research process, as a photographic ‘gift’ to the participants, and as an art work) nevertheless generated further ethical questions beyond those that could be pre-emptively named. Emergent experiences within the constraint of School Photo Day (2020) presented new insight regarding ethics. These included reflections on the levels of ‘potential exposure’ for participants in both the process and the image, and the use of imagery in further research processes (even where consent had been granted).

This paper discusses a double-edged ethical sword of making images with children, while making images that might also be ‘for’ audiences outside of the immediate (school) context of the project. We consider the potential dangers and benefits of artistic research and research creation-approaches, and how their (deliberate) uncertainty challenges the ‘informed’ nature of informed consent. We explore how practice research that unfolds as it is made, enables a shared insight into school and how it produces ‘the child’. We also argue for the potential of practice research and how it offers a shared, collective mode of paying attention to experience, including the experience of research and ethics in themselves.