Pictures provide a wealth of information about the person or people in the photograph.  We can identify more obvious details such as gender age and ethnicity from an initial look. However  paying closer attention to the background will help us extract more obscure elements of the individual(s) and indeed begin to form a picture of their identity.

 

For this session children are to bring in some photographs of themselves at any age, either alone or with friends and family. The pictures can be taken anywhere, for example at home or at school, on holiday or in a park.  This lesson is very personal to the children as they are sharing photographs of personal value with one another.  However, after this lesson children will have a greater empathy with how artists' may feel when their work is being analysed. 

 

The aim of this session is to give children an opportunity to combine the skills they have acquired during the past 3 sessions and apply them to engage with and reflect on their own  photographs.  The teacher should focus on helping children to seek out the more subtle and hidden messages that are resting in the photographs.  This lesson should begin with a class discussion on one or two photographs selected from the resource.

 

Children can create a mind map of all the different bits of information their picture discloses.  Children can choose both the size of paper and from a range of drawing material. Mind maps can include words, sentences, pictures and symbols.