“Det som bara vi ser” : Kamera, stad och unga blickar

Sammanfattning

This study explores how young people perceive, experience, and visually articulate the urban environment through photography. Conducted as a participatory art-educational project with students aged 12–18, the research invited participants to document urban spaces using thermal instant cameras, followed by individual photo-dialogues grounded in photoelicitation. Through a thematic visual analysis, the study examines how notions of place, identity, and belonging emerge across four central themes: the city as a space of consumption, popular culture and identity, architectural narratives, and nature as contrast and refuge. The photographs reveal the city not as a static backdrop, but as a fluid terrain of emotions, memories, and rituals. Spaces of fast food and advertising become sites of comfort, longing, or critique; pop culture stickers suggest silent kinships; skyscrapers and wild flora reframe the overlooked, offering fleeting sanctuaries. These visual expressions are understood as situated knowledge, shaped by cultural experience, memory, and embodied presence. Grounded in theories of visual culture, spatial thinking, and art education, the study argues that photography can serve as a democratic and reflective practice, giving voice to young people’s everyday geographies and revealing what often remains unseen. In this context, the camera becomes more than a device of representation; it is a space of encounter. Each image not only records the city’s appearance but captures how it breathes, hesitates, and pulses. It is a practice of becoming, where perception and emotion are exposed within the frame, and the familiar is returned to us charged with new significance.