Feature: Local photographer Jason Wilde on his 'Negotiating Childhood' exhibition at Kentish Town Health Centre

Published: 22 April 2010
by CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS

IT is an unprecedented exhibition, featuring the unsmiling faces of dozens of children and teenagers from across Camden.

The highly unusual and exceptionally local photography exhibition, Negotiating Childhood, captures Camden’s youngsters as they make their way from childhood to their awkward teenage years, and aims to challenge the viewers’ perceptions of children.

The man behind the pictures, hung on the first floor of the Kentish Town Health Centre, is Kentish Town-based snapper Jason Wilde (main picture).

“Part of the reason I did this project is because of the current climate,” he said on Friday at the opening of the exhibition, paid for by the Kentish Town Improvement Fund and Arts Council money and part of a new arts programme at the centre. It marks one of the first exhibitions at the newly opened building and will run for two months, to be followed by further exhibitions and an artist in residence along with free workshops.

“I’m trying get people to re-engage with children and realise they’re not so scary after all. They’re not all out causing trouble,” he added.

Living on the once-troubled Clarence Way estate, his home for the past 15 years, Wilde is no stranger to youth disorder, but says current society makes life much harder for them than for grown-ups. 

Describing the bullets youngsters dodge in their everyday life, including premature sexualisation and the burden of consumerism, he said its left them “struggling to occupy a meaningful place within society”.

He added: “Today’s children leap ever earlier into an adult world of stress, consumerism and sexuality. Without the traditional social structures or rites of passage that once helped them to cope, the premature socialisation of children has led to a generation of young people struggling to occupy a meaningful place within society.”

Having grown up in Somers Town, he was the third generation in his family to go the Sir William Collins school, now South Camden Community School. It started his photography career, taking pictures of what he knew best: characters from the streets of his childhood. This lead to his portraits hanging in the Tate gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Lowry in Manchester. Negotiating Childhood is something of a follow-up to that first exhibition, but features youngsters from play centres across Camden; characteristically with their hands in their pockets and never smiling. 

“A smile is a happy portrait,” he explains of the array of unsmiling faces that line the walls of the Bartholomew surgery. 

“It’s not engaging. A neutral face holds the viewers’ attention much better,” he adds, but insists that’s as far as he goes in posing the children; the rest is all them. 

Rejecting the adage “never work with children and animals”, he says of the experience: “It’s fantastic – better than working with adults.”

• Negotiating Childhood is at Kentish Town Health Centre, Bartholomew Road, NW5. For more information about the arts programme, email Carol Marin-Pache: marin-pache@ hotmail.co.uk