This presentation addresses how early childhood education practice, based on traditions and unspoken beliefs about what children are, know and need, may be challenged as children’s photographic perspectives of the place, time and spaces they inhabit, become visible. The presentation is based on two researchers re-reading and re-analysing work of the visual data from two different case studies with different aims. 

The children that were participants in the two studies from where the empirical material of this paper was retrieved, belong to groups that beforehand are positioned and viewed from a deficit perspective; one group of children that are newly arrived in Sweden and said to “lack the language” as well as the right properties of Swedishness (Åkerblom & Harju 2019). The other group positioned as “small” or “younger” children, conceptualized as lacking verbal language as well as maturity (Magnusson, 2018a, 2018b). 

By following the children’s use of cameras and depicting of the places, an aspect that evolved was when “time dissolved”. The children broke a linear time flow open and thereby widened the capacity of the camera, as well as the act of memory production in the use of cameras. In order to follow and interpret this aspect in the data, the concept of “widened moment” became a way to understand and describe the children's use of the cameras. 

The results show that by following the (photographic) gaze of the child, when he/she is becoming onlooker (Sparrman & Lindgren, 2010) and take part as a participant holding a camera, the understanding of preschool may change in a way that can offer a diverse and widened understanding of children’s interests and their ways of communicating with each other and with the teachers as well as the education setting. An understanding that can tell another and a hitherto untold story about children’s experience and exploration of space and also of their perspective of everyday life in their well-known places. Children take photographs in the institutional place that in different ways concern aspects of space and time, this way they are communicating their experiences and meanings attributed to the place.