When we contemporary photographers point our cameras to children, particularly our own, we often defy the traditions of portrait photographers. In lieu of a perfect pose or pressed dress we capture children in their world.

Like many working photographers I capture pictures of my own daughter while on vacation or while she’s with me on assignment. Sometimes she’s not aware I’m photographing her and sometimes she’s a player in the game of creating the photograph. As a mother and photographer my ambition becomes how to document the moment while being ever present in that moment. For that reason I prefer to use a plastic Holga camera for much of my personal work. I enjoy the fantastical feeling provided by the plastic lens of the Holga but most of all, the limited 12 exposures inside a camera taped with duct tapes forces a discipline unnecessary with more modern cameras.

John Caserta uses Kodachrome, one of the oldest films still on the market and captures a young girl framed in front of a saturated blue sky. John, an artist based in Providence, Rhode Island works primarily in medium format and 4x5 cameras.

Pailin Wedel, a photojournalist in North Carolina, photographs a portrait of a young girl in front of the girl’s temporary dwelling in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Davis Turner, a photographer from Charlotte, captures his nephew at home on Thanksgiving Day.

Pat Davison, a father of three girls, has contributed an image of two girls behind the curtain of a ballet performance.

Davis, Pat and Pailin, like most working photojournalists, prefer the flexibility and speed of high-end digital cameras.

As documentary photographers we use the landscape of a child’s life as the backdrops to our images - the sandbox, the sky, a highchair, a fence. The place where a child learns to play, dance and the place where he is fed often reveals how he lives within society. These photographs attempt to capture both the idealized and unsentimental lives and backdrops of childhood.

—Missy McLamb