I have decided to use three specific creative elements in my photo to convey the hard differences between girls and boys childhood through their toys. The three creative elements include Centering, Symbolism, and Color. My photo also connects to the reading in Module 5, “The “Two Cultures” of Childhood” in the segregation of toys.
The most obvious, centering, places the boys toys to the far left of the photo and the girls toys to the far right of the photo. I did this in order to convey the large separation between the toys by gender and centered that space so that the viewer understands that this is the focus. The symbolism was something I noticed after the photos were taken, but I found it to be one of the most important aspects. The symbols I saw were the broken tiles in between the two sets of toys. I think they can represent the broken, negative, hard and cold connotation that comes with a child who wants to venture into the other side of toys. The last element was color, where I chose a grey background for the spaces between the sets of toys. The color grey conveys confusion and negativity which are both feelings a child may feel when trying to enter that “grey area”. I believe that those three elements, Centering, symbolism and color, effectively relay the separation between boys and girls toys.
The majority of The “Two Cultures” of Childhood discusses the ways that children behave differently because of their sex. There is an entire section dedicated to “Toys and Activity Preference” where the general consensus is that the “boy toys” are rougher and more violent, while the “girls toys” are sweet and girlish. You can see this in my photo because all of the toys on the left, boys, are of guns, trucks, wrestling action figures and fast cars. The girls get a pink and purple cradle filled with babies and fluffy stuffed animals. When setting the photo, it was quite easy to separate them because they were already in separate bins. All I could think was “are they so different that they can’t even go in the same bin?”. However, the reading did say that children find it difficult to interact with the other sex at all during play activities. Those are the ways I was able to connect the reading of The “Two Cultures” of childhood to my photo.
Works Cited
“The “Two Cultures” of Childhood. Readings, Module 5.
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