Take a Peep – Children as photographers

The Take a Peep exhibition focuses on children as camera users, who have a right to their own ways of expressing themselves and of making pictures. In the workshops the children have taken a peep through the camera's viewfinder - at themselves, at each other and at their surroundings - and taken pictures of the things they consider important. They have created imaginary stories and documented their everyday lives. To its viewers, the exhibition offers a glimpse into the children's world, into what it looks like through their eyes. Come and get some tips on taking photographs with children and young people!

The Take a Peep exhibition and the workshops held in the summer and autumn of 2009 have been produced by the VB Photographic Centre. The VB Photographic Centre in Kuopio is Finland's first regional photographic centre. The Centre's mission is to promote photographic culture, especially in North Savo and Eastern Finland. The Centre also operates on a national level via its network of collaborators. The Take a Peep exhibition is being shown at the Finnish Museum of Photography as part of the cooperation between regional photographic centres.

Leading the Take a Peep workshops were artist Ullamari Lindström, photographer Paula Pohjamo and photographer Maria Kärkkäinen, along with coordinator Riitta Repo. Also participating were teachers and a large number of other partners in collaboration. A big thank you to all of them!

The Take a Peep workshops were arranged in collaboration with various public bodies. Among the most important are the LASTU cultural centre for children, North Savo Arts Council, the ISAK ry film centre and Savon Sanomat newspaper. The project has received support from the Arts Council of Finland's Subcommittee for Children's Culture and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Also sharing in this collaboration are Olympus and the Tunnin kuva photo-shop chain.

The Finnish Museum of Photography's own small addition to the exhibition is its Imagined Images workshop package, which looked at how to create mood and how to tell a story in a single image. The package was jointly planned and run for the Finnish Museum of Photography this spring by art-education student Elsa Hessle and photography student Anne Yli-Ikkelä. More than 100 pictures taken by children and young people in Helsinki are on display in the exhibition.