Playground, photographs by James Mollison, Aperture Foundation

The New York gallery of the Aperture Foundation is exhibiting a photography exhibition by James Mollison. With Playground, the Kenyan photographer investigates school playgrounds all over the world, places of our childhood where we learnt how to socialise and our place in the world through play.

If we believe the Greek philosopher, Plato who said that you can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation, then James Mollison - author of the “Playground” book and the exhibition by the same name at Aperture Gallery in New York  - knows a lot about the human race. Because he visited school playgrounds all over the world for ages, travelling to places like Argentina, Palestine, the UK and Tibet to photograph children during recess.

For James Mollison, on the one hand, the photographic study provides the opportunity to underscore the major differences that you can see in the environment where children spend their breaks between lessons, thereby referencing the inequalities between haves and have-nots, and on the other the sharing of an intimate look that also takes the person looking at the photographs back to their own childhood.

One of the most important aspects of our life-forming experience is the time we socialise at school. The playgrounds photographed by Mollison are indeed a kind of benchmark test for social life as adults. Here, kids gain skill-building experience, they negotiate relations, they form the first network of friends, classmates, interest groups and they learn to live with each other. 



Schools are where in the present you develop the social skills for the future, through play: moments skilfully captured by James Mollison who created the images on show from multiple frames of the locations enlivened by recess play, which he then recomposed in a visual story that narrates the delicate equilibrium existing between the children.
In conjunction with the exhibition Aperture has published the book "Playground" by James Mollison.

Christiane Bürklein

Exhibition: Playground, photographs by James Mollison 
Location: Aperture Foundation, 547 W 27^th Street, New York, NY 10001, USA
Dates: from 16 April to 25 June 2015
Images: Courtesy of Aperture Foundation, all rights reserved by the author (see caption and information on the image)