How I’m Using Pictures in our Play Space

At Camp Redwood, for as long as I can remember, each Leader had an area in our Lodge where we kept their basket (a laundry basket) and tarp. We used the basket to hold all the lunch pails, sweatshirts, and other accessories of the campers in their group and the tarp to spread out and sit on for lunchtime. These items sat on the floor against the wall all around the room and above them on the wall hung a poster board with the Leaders’ name. This poster hung up all summer and while its primary purpose was to denote this specific area for each Leaders’ groups’ stuff – it served another really important, deeper purpose.

This was a way for each Leader to reveal to the whole camp some of their story. Leaders were encouraged to decorate the poster board. They were provided with a printout of their name and the poster board, that’s it. The only other requirement for how it should be decorated was, you must include at least one recent picture. So it became a way for campers especially, but also their families and the other camp staff, to recognize each Leader as well as learn a little something about them. Some Leaders with exceptional art skill would do intricate artistic work to their poster board; but most people used a variety of pictures to share who they are. I remember learning so much just from walking around the room and reviewing posters. Oh, this Leader loves soccer and that Leader is married and this one here has a twin and another one loves to bake. 

On Monday mornings when kids would check in for camp and learn which Leader they would be with for the week they would rush to go check out the poster board, quickly grabbing a few vital pieces of information about what their Leader is like and who they are. 

I remember the first time I was handed a poster board to make my own as a Leader, after years of viewing all these Leader posters, I finally got to make my own. I got to tell a story. I included pictures of myself at camp, on the stage, with my friends. Now this was back in the early 2000’s when you took a bunch of pictures on a camera, had no idea what they’d look like until you got them developed a little while later, and then flipped through to recall these experiences. Choosing photos to hang was a task because there was no re-taking a picture – you had what you had. Also, these photos were a commodity, often the only copy of the moment you had in your possession, and no way to get more. I can remember sitting on the floor with pictures spread out all around me trying to determine which pictures to glue onto the board, wanting to both share my story but also preserve these precious moments. I also recall feeling less concerned with how I looked in these pictures. Their job wasn’t to get me a modeling career, it was to represent who I am and what I’m about to my campers and the rest of the camp community. Plus, all these people would see me in person all day, every day, for nine weeks. If a picture wasn’t very flattering, or conversely extra flattering, they’d all know how I actually look by seeing me in the flesh. In a pre-social media world it was this incredibly fun and also sincerely authentic exercise to get to share some of your story, through pictures, with a community to which you belong.

Pictures tell a story. 

Fast forward to about a year and a half ago; I was in a group coaching program with some other moms run by The Parent Empowerment Movement and a suggestion was made that made me recall the importance of the storytelling pictures do for us. This suggestion was made right around Halloween and it was to take a few candid pictures at the pumpkin patch, ones unlike the perfectly posed picture you might post on social media. One a little more organic and true to the actual experience your child(ren) had at the patch and hang one up somewhere in your home because the more authentic picture is what your kid(s) actually remember – not that posed up perfection filtering out all the honesty of the outing. I thought this was a brilliant suggestion and, remembering how pictures were used at Camp Redwood, I decided to take it a step further.

I subscribed to Mootsch, which is a monthly photo printout subscription. Every month I get a reminder to upload 10 photos – thank goodness for reminders, right!? – and the process is very easy. Then, they appear in my mailbox. I make sure to select 10 photos from the last month of my son experiencing. These are not necessarily my favorite pictures of him or the cutest ones. They’re not the ones I’d send to grandparents or make into holiday cards. They’re ones I know he’ll connect memories to because they’re things he loves doing, or moments that mattered, or shared with people he loves. Each month I hang these new pictures up on the wall of our play room and take down some of the older ones, being sure to leave a couple here and there from three to six months ago, but not so many that it’s overwhelming. I also have an area of the wall I add any pictures of him with people, and leave those up all the time.

I’m amazed how often I catch him taking these pictures in, reviewing and remembering. I’m amazed at how a picture can be up for a month or two with no attention and then one day he’ll point at it and tell me the story behind the picture. I’m amazed at how he can remember people he’s only met once, and point at them in a picture and tell me what they were doing together or who they are in relation to him. 

These pictures are helping him understand his own story. They reflect back to him activities he enjoys, progress he’s made, things he’s learned, places he’s been, things he’s eaten, people he knows. They’re not artificially cute – although I think he’s pretty cute most of the time – but instead they reflect back to him what those experiences felt like. 

Pictures can tell an important story. We’ve forgotten this in a culture where everyone’s pictures are online for everyone to see, filtered and polished and explained – where the storyteller can manipulate the meaning. If we let them, pictures can tell an authentic story. We can imagine our phone photo libraries the way we used to have a box of all our photos and spread them out in front of us and choose which pictures to display to our child(ren). We can decide to present them with a polished version of perfection or help them make meaning of their story through honest representations of the life they’re living. We can choose to preserve some of these images just for those closest to us, hung on the walls of our own homes – just like the camp lodge – as opposed to the internet, guaranteeing the people who see them are people who are those who honor the story these kids are living. 

What a gift we can give to our kids to surround them with images of their actual experiences and let them decide how to tell that story to themselves and others.

Originally posted 4/25/23 on old website