First exposures: a photographic encounter with nature inside and outside a museum helps kids learn to love the land - The Sierra Club Bulletin: News For Members - Inner City Outings program - Brief Article

Sierra, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Jennifer Hattam

As the camera zooms in on the ripples in a stack of broken Styrofoam, Ariana lights up. "It looks like a waterfall!" she exclaims, her grin matching the smiley-face on her overalls. Students clamor to take turns as "lighting designer" or "framer"--the first uses a slide projector and a piece of cardboard to illuminate or cast shadows on the subject, while the second shoots the picture with a video camera. Others keep their eyes on the television screen that displays the resulting still image, watching photographic imagination in action.

The video activity begins a two-day foray into nature photography for these 20 young students from Ashland, a small, unincorporated community near Oakland, California. After a 45-minute lesson in basic composition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art--including texture; shadows and highlights; and wide, medium, and close-up angles--the group tromps upstairs to view the Ansel Adams at 100 exhibit. While a few kids' attentions wander, most peer intently, crowding around the photographs, pointing out alligator shapes in rocks, faces in plunging cascades, and landscapes that make them feel happy or sad.

For these 8- to 13-year-olds, the outing is a first exposure to landscape art--and a welcome day-trip away from home. "Since Ashland is an unincorporated area, we don't get a lot of the basic services that cities do," explains Sasha Tchir, a community coordinator who works at one of the neighborhood's housing complexes. Crime rates in Ashland are high, and the median household income is 28 percent below the county average.

The SAFE Ashland Neighborhood Organization provides an escape: a "summer fun camp" run by Tchir and others that includes African dance instruction, Spanish class, and trips to baseball games. For the nature-photography excursion, they teamed up with the Sierra Club's Inner City Outings program, which donated cameras for a subsequent dayhike in Oakland's Redwood Regional Park.

"A lot of these kids had never been hiking before, so it was great for them to get a little more conscious of the nature that's around them, even in urban areas," Tchir says. "I think that being outdoors was really freeing; it brought out the best in them." These goals match those of the Inner City Outings program, which began in 1971 and now takes 15,000 inner-city and physically disabled youth on wilderness trips each year. Volunteers work with schools, rehabilitation centers, and community groups like SAFE Ashland to foster an appreciation for nature and a desire to protect it.

"One of the things the kids really got into was our trash competition: Whoever picked up the most garbage on the hike won a camera," Tchir says. "Even better, when we came back home, they started picking up the trash there."

To learn more about Inner City Outings, visit the Sierra Club's Web site at www.sierraclub.org/ico or call (415) 977-5628.