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As Bob Steele (1998, 2011) insists, drawing is a language and should have a significant place in children’s lives. It engages children in expressive, emotional, imaginative, and intellectual ways. It is an important cognitive and affective process, a rich means of storytelling, and for young children, a valuable way of making sense of the world. Through drawing, one can express what cannot be adequately put into words.

This chapter has emerged from conversations that Sylvia and I have had around her experiences with three- and four-year-olds using cameras and my examination of ethical issues in using photos as part of the documentation processes that teachers use to understand children’s thinking (Tarr 2011). We are interested in the intersections of pedagogical documentation (Dahlberg 2012; Dahlberg, Moss & Pence 2007; Rinaldi 2006) research with children, children using cameras to document their own interests (Bitou & Waller 2011; Clark 2005), and a shared space in which educators, children, and cameras blur and blend insider and outsider perspectives into a between-space (Kind 2013; Wilson 2007). In this chapter we will explore the questions and issues that have emerged for us around the use of photography with young children that have implications for both educators and researchers incorporating visual methods with children, especially young children.

Here is a call that yearns for what has been separated and one that also rings with a joy at the resounding rhythm of life. Possibilities are all around us— the empty, the full, and all that lies between— the choices among them are ours, a choice to wake up, a choice to hear the call of our own heartbeat. Surely we recognize the rhythm, the spirit that animates our deepest places and pulsates through every now moment, that rhythm which vitalizes our being from its prison of numbness. But do we feel that rhythm? Do we hear that call?