Landcare and Landscapes and Accidental Beauty: Failing Digital Technologies and the Gaze of Child Researchers

This visual essay curates an exhibition of photographic data from a project with children about Landcare, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to managing environmental issues in local communities across Australia. The project sought to empower children to engage with Landcare Reserves through participatory arts-based research to map their awareness of and participation in local Landcare Reserve sites. This visual essay recognizes the images as agentic entities, with the power to activate the gaze beyond the boundaries of this project as embedded yet transcendent from it whilst simultaneously acknowledging the ‘failing’ agency of the sensing body of the camera.