childhood

Grown is a new photo series by Hamburg, Germany-based photographer Sebastian Baumann that "examines the border between childhood and adulthood -- if there is any."

Here's a beautiful then-and-now photo that shows a bride and groom on their wedding day in the exact same pose as when they received their first holy communion as children decades ago.

German photographer Thomas Friedrich Schaefer has created Experiential Spaces, a series of photos that are inspired by fragments of his childhood memories of growing up. At the same time, he wants to stimulate the viewers to bring out their own childhood memories too.

There are few things that symbolize the innocence of childhood the way a teddy bear does. A stuffed companion who is as real to a 2-year-old as anything made of flesh and blood, at that age the teddy bear isn't just something you play with... it plays back.

It's this innocence and wonder that photographer Adrian Murray captures in his touching photographs of his two boys, Emerson and Grayson, and their toy bear.

If you were like many kids, you probably spent much of your childhood in a hybrid world where reality and imagination fused into an indistinguishable whole. Magical creatures walked the streets, everyday-objects transformed into priceless relics and your favorite movie characters walked down the street opposite you.

For photographer Thomas Dagg, this meant one thing and one thing only: Star Wars. And so for his recent series by the same name, he recreated this imaginary world by creatively inserting Star Wars characters and objects into the real world around him.

Twenty years ago, at the tender age of 4, Netherlands-based artist Telmo Pieper wasn't quite as skilled at his craft as he is now. And so, in his series Kiddie Arts, he decided to revisit some of his 'early work' and bring it up to speed using his prodigious Photoshop skills.

Everybody takes photos of their family, trying their best to keep a chronicle of their children as they grow up. They capture moments both mundane and momentous and store them away in what later becomes the family album (although it seems that might soon be a thing of the past).

But while everybody might make an effort to capture these memories, photographer Alain Laboile does so with an expertise behind the lens that has turned his own personal family album, a series called La Famille, into a heartwarming viral sensation.

Digital and mobile phone photography have made it easy for parents to document every waking (and non-waking) moment of a child's life, but what effect is this constant picture-taking having on kids? David Zweig has written up an article over at the New York Times arguing that our culture of photography is intruding on the preciousness of youth, and that parents should take fewer photographs of their children.

After finding toys from his childhood in his grandparents' attic, photographer Julien Mauve decided to create a series of photographs that imagines what those toys would look like in our serious adult world. The series is titled "Back to Childhood".

AgeMaps is a project by photographer Bobby Neel Adams in which he does "photo surgery" on portraits to show two different moments in a person's life in the same image. For each subject, Adams takes a childhood photo and a current photo, prints them at the same proportions, tears them in half, and glues the halves together. He says that this is to "telescope the slow process of aging into a single picture," and that "a jump of time is established at the tear."

DEAR PHOTOGRAPH is a neat photo project by Taylor Jones that collects pictures of pictures from the past in the present. These are images that show old photos held up and aligned to the present day location, offering a glimpse into what once was.

Here’s a fun story that might convince you to snap all the photos you can of your kids: Alex and …