My work on childhood is anything but idyllic; it testifies to a radical freedom of imagination. I capture the moments in which children create self-contained worlds within conditions that, though complex to an adult eye, remain familiar and reassuring to them.

In this series childhood emerges as a phenomenon of human freedom: the child has not yet imposed limits on themself, whereas the adult disciplines time and space, replacing multiplicity with the linearity of routine.

This contrast is registered in photographs of children from diverse cultural and political contexts. The geography is deliberately broad: historical and social backgrounds do not predetermine how a child perceives the world. Their behaviour points to a universal imaginative potential that, with age, is packaged into a chain of prohibitions and fears.

The child’s image here is not an object of sentiment but a reminder of a lost capacity to construct reality freely. Maturity does not have to equal the forfeiture of fantasy and freedom.