Blogs
November 11, 2025
Seeing Otherwise: Photography as Pedagogical Storytelling Practice
with support from ECPN leadership team Meagan Montpetit & Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Why Photography?
In this blog, I engage photography as a method of pedagogical storytelling. It is companion to the field note Tracing Charcoal: A Material Encounter. That field note offers a visual narration of an ongoing material inquiry in a licensed multi-age in-home program where children and their educator engage with charcoal in corporeal ways. This work is inspired by the ethos of Encounters with Materials , which invites us to notice how materials participate in pedagogical relationships, moving, provoking and shaping experience. As the pedagogist working alongside the centre, I turn to photography not to assess or track development but to follow these encounters with care. I ask what photography might make visible that conventional observation or written reflection often overlooks—what stories it might help me tell that do not aim to show what children learn but how they live, feel and relate with the world. In thinking this through, I draw on insights from Edward Burtynsky, whose work reminds us that photographs never merely document but also frame and shape the stories that can be told. Burtynsky’s large-scale images of landscapes altered by human industry press us to see that every photograph carries perspective and consequence, urging us to reckon with what is made visible and what remains unseen.[1] In this context, photography did not simply serve as a tool for capturing what happened—it responded to the encounter itself. As atelierista Sylvia Kind writes, photography is not just a means of representing.[2] This idea stayed with me as I photographed the children’s work with charcoal.
Rather than documenting children using charcoal, the camera attuned to movement—trailing behind smudged hands, lingering in the dust. Photography drew me toward what mattered: the crumble of pigment, the smudged cheeks, the squeal of charcoal across paper. As charcoal clung to skin and travelled with bodies, the lens became a way to hold these gestures with care and intimacy. I followed the reciprocal exchanges between children and material, attending to the entanglements of bodies, materials and images co-composing each moment.
With this choice—softening the human form and bringing charcoal into focus—I worked to decenter the human in the storytelling, following the material’s own pathways and invitations. In the spirit of Burtynsky’s photography, which foregrounds landscapes shaped by human action yet often eludes the figure of the human[3], the camera attunes to presence, consequence and relational entanglement. This approach invites noticing how materials move, persist and affect the spaces and bodies they touch, extending the ethics of attention and care beyond human-centered narratives.
Photography as Pedagogical Practice
Photography has long shaped how I listen and think in pedagogical spaces. Early encounters with the work of Edward Burtynsky, along with ongoing conversations with artists and curators[4] in my community, continue to influence how I move with this medium. Photography does not feel like an add-on—it acts as a methodological companion in my practice, offering ways to stay with complexity, relation and the more-than-visible.
In pedagogical contexts, I engage photography as a way of thinking with the world. Rooted in an anti-extractive orientation, as I’ve shared in previous blogs [Anti-extraction and Intimacy: Storytelling Pedagogies of Place in the North, Part One, Anti-extraction and Intimacy: Storytelling Pedagogies of Place in the North, Part Two ], I engage photography as a practice of attention, attunement and encounter. Photography stays close to moments that are fleeting or difficult to name, helping me dwell with complexity rather than resolve it. Carrying a camera into early childhood spaces, I move slowly, notice carefully, and wonder—allowing photography to draw me into relation.
In previous storytelling blogs, I’ve explored how storytelling can invite new ways of seeing and making meaning in early childhood education contexts. Rather than positioning the educator as a neutral observer who records evidence of learning, I describe education as a deeply relational and interpretive process: partial, contingent and co-composed. Photography engaged as a practice of questioning aligns with this stance. Its framing and focus carry perspective—images shape what we attend to, what is remembered and what fades. A photograph may expose what was overlooked or prompt rethinking of what was assumed. In this way, photography becomes a form of pedagogical inquiry, asking us to revisit, reframe and reimagine. It invites us to pause, to return, to ask: What else is happening here? What remains unfinished? Through this orientation, photography offers an ongoing invitation to think, feel and respond—again and again.
Returning to a photograph with curiosity shifts us from documenting to wondering. A photograph might ask: What else is happening here? What do I notice now that I didn’t see before? What stories are still unfolding beyond the frame? These questions open space for multiple interpretations, unsettling the idea of a single narrative or objective truth. In this way, photography becomes an active participant in pedagogy, a co-conspirator in meaning making. It slows us down, invites us to see differently and offers space to dwell in the in-between: between image and interpretation, between moment and memory, between what was and what might still become.
Photography is never neutral.[5] It frames, selects and excludes. But when I practice it pedagogically—with intention and care—it becomes a way to think with children, with materials and with the conditions of learning. Photography surfaces the affective and aesthetic dimensions of early childhood encounters—those embodied gestures, sensations and relational movements that often escape notice.[6] By aesthetic I mean the sensory, perceptual and compositional qualities of experience that shape how we engage with the world. Practiced this way, photography invites us to dwell with what is unfolding rather than rush to define or conclude.
Within the charcoal inquiry, photography offered a way to follow the material. Rather than photographing children using charcoal, I attended to charcoal’s gestures, textures and migrations. The camera revealed how the material lived in the space: how it clung to skin, moved between bodies and surfaces and shifted with the rhythm of the day. Photography listened with the material while also attending to the human stories around it. It helped me trace how charcoal called for attention, how it marked, lingered and unsettledthe classroom.
Material Encounters Through the Lens
Charcoal was unfamiliar to all of us—educator, children and pedagogist alike. It quickly asserted itself through its textures, movements and marks. Charcoal softened under touch, coating fingers with a silky residue. Pressed at certain angles, it scratched and screeched across paper. It held contradictions: bold and forceful in its lines, it broke apart without warning. More than a passive tool, charcoal shaped the rhythm of our engagement, leaving traces on skin, clothing and surfaces, demanding we adapt to its unpredictable nature. We were struck by charcoal’s capacity to do the unexpected. This became especially clear when one child discovered how to draw out a high-pitched squeak as charcoal met paper—something none of us, despite many attempts, could reproduce. Only that child, through a particular angle and pressure, seemed able to coax the sound into being. Charcoal responded differently to each hand. The child returned to this technique again and again, delighted by the sharp screech it produced. Others gathered, some mimicking the movement, others experimenting with variations, yet the sound remained elusive. In that moment, charcoal emerged as a co-actor: playful, selective, responsive.
Through the camera, I noticed how the children’s bodies adjusted to charcoal’s provocations: tilted wrists, gliding arms, a quiet focus that attuned to movement, sound and texture. In choosing to photograph close-ups of charcoal’s residue on fingers, on tables, smudged across skin and clothing, I composed images that decentered the child’s face and foregrounded the relational traces between body and material. These became impressions rather than portraits. By focusing on fragments, the photographs highlighted ambiguity and resisted resolution, lingering in the aftermath of touch where what remained was a trace of relation. In these moments, photography witnessed the ongoing life of the material long after the drawing had stopped.
Charcoal altered the tempo of our days. The material called for slower, more attentive rhythms—hands needed washing, tables needed dusting, movements became more deliberate. Charcoal’s unruly nature introduced moments of surprise and brought generative unpredictability into our days. We lingered with its presence, adapting to its smudges and scatterings. The camera helped me follow charcoal’s pace: its quiet pauses and sudden outbursts, the marks it left on windows, carpets, tabletops and clothing. At the same time, charcoal’s traces—on bodies, materials, moods—often unsettled our expectations of order and control. Living alongside charcoal meant engaging with its unpredictability, allowing it to shape what we did and how we did it. Looking back through the photographs, what emerges is not a progression of skills or a tidy narrative arc but a series of entangled moments where children and charcoal moved together in ways that exceed easy description. These photographs hold the complexity of material encounters. They honour what remains unfinished, messy and beautifully unresolved—staying with what continues to unfold rather than reducing it to explanation.
Ethics and Intimacy Photographing in Early Childhood Spaces
As both a pedagogist and a photographer, I work within the ethical weight that accompanies documenting children through images. Kind reminds us that photography is always entangled with power, perspective and affect; it does something rather than simply recording what has happened.[7] As mentioned above, photography is never neutral—it is always an act of framing, of interpretation, of deciding what is seen and what is left outside the frame.[8] These choices do not sit solely with the photographer. They arise within relations—among bodies, materials, histories, intentions. In the presence of these tensions, questions remain active: What happened in this photo? What does it hold? Who is it for?
Photographing children carries responsibilities that continually evolve. The camera often turns toward gesture, proximity and the traces left behind in materials. These compositional choices are both aesthetic and ethical, emerging from a commitment to care. Protecting the intimacy of children’s experiences while making visible their relations with the world often means working with softness—through blur, distance, angle or crop. Anonymity preserves the encounter and invites a different kind of attention, one that lingers with relation and expands beyond identity.
There is a difference between taking a photograph and witnessing a moment. Taking implies ownership, extraction and a finished product. Witnessing, by contrast, opens space for presence, reciprocity and the possibility of being affected.[9] In pedagogical contexts, photography can act as a form of witnessing—staying with what unfolds rather than capturing what is complete. In these moments, the camera extends a practice of listening. It marks what matters by lingering a little longer, not to possess but to remain with what is still becoming.
Emphasizing photography’s ability to do, I invite educators, children and families to engage with the photographs as we continue to work with charcoal. The children and I sit together to print photos from our time with charcoal and place in a photo album. This album is welcome to travel between the classroom and home, adding more stories to the movement of charcoal.
Ultimately, my hope is that these images—and the stories they compose—can be invitations. Not conclusions or evidence but provocations that make space for others to wonder, to feel, and to ask questions of their own.
Photography as Story
Photographs can carry the weight of a moment—marks of what happened and also of how something felt, how it moved, how it mattered. In pedagogical work, photography can act as a provocation, a way of opening up complexity, inviting us to linger with what resists explanation. A photograph can ask: What is happening here? What relations are unfolding? What else might this moment hold?
Photography can be understood as a process of untangling meaning. A single image revisited over time can shift understandings, spark new questions or surface previously unnoticed details. The smudge of charcoal on skin, the pause in a gesture, the play of light across a surface become starting points for thinking together, inviting deeper engagement through their openness and multiplicity.
When photographs are shared with children, families and colleagues, they can support collective reflection. These images act as traces of encounter, opening possibilities rather than fixing conclusions, and they help make visible the complexity of pedagogical work. How photographs are shared matters. Some images invite curiosity and conversation while others may unintentionally close down meaning. Thoughtful composition, care in framing and attention to the ethics of visibility all shape the stories that images are able to carry.
Provocations to the Reader
As photography moves through early childhood spaces, it becomes a companion to thinking, and questions take shape. These questions live in the background of our documentation practices, surfacing in moments of pause, of looking again, of wondering what else might be seen.
- What might photography create in relation with children and materials?
- How do we attend to the nonverbal, the more-than-human, the ephemeral in our documentation practices? What might this attention conjure?
- What does a story without words make possible?
- What responsibilities emerge when we make something visible?
- What might happen if we follow a material with our camera—not to capture but to accompany it?
These questions linger and interrupt. They open doors. In staying with them, photography shifts from capturing to inviting—curiosity, relation and the possibility of seeing otherwise.
[1] Edward Burtynsky, “Photographs,” Edward Burtynsky, accessed October 3, 2025, https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs.
[2] Sylvia Kind, “Lively Entanglements: The Doings, Movements, and Enactments of Photography,” Global Studies of Childhood 3, no. 4 (2013): 427–41, https://doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2013.3.4.427.
[3] Burtynsky, “Photographs.”
[4] Ehsan Mohammadi, “How Does Visual Storytelling Reveal Both Activity and Affect?” LinkedIn February (2025), https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ehsan-mohammadi-522a76223_how-does-visual-storytelling-reveal-both-activity-7316904443558404097-UEAZ.
[5] Teju Cole, “Against Neutrality,” The New York Times Magazine, January 17, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/against-neutrality.html.
[6] Linda Åhäll, “Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion,” International Political Sociology 12, no. 1, (2018): 36–52, https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olx024.
[7] Kind, “Lively Entanglements,” 431.
[8] Wiebke Leister, “Mona Lisa on a Bad Day: Or the Impossibility of Neutrality and the Non-Likeness of Photographic Portraiture,” Photography & Culture 3, no. 2 (2010): 153–74, https://doi.org/10.2752/175145110X12700318320396.
[9] Nxumalo, Fikile. 2019. Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education. 1st ed. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group, p. 44.