If This Picture Could Talk - Project Statement - photography class and delinquency prevention

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Lisa Kahane

For a while I taught photography one day a week to girls selected by their middle school. My students were mostly, though not exclusively, young women of color. My efforts were part of a gender specific program run by a non-profit arts organization in a small city upstate. The program was funded by the federal government as part of a study to determine if art can prevent delinquency. The answer seemed obvious to me as an artist. The success of my workshop however, was quite different from what I expected.

The stated goals of the program were to present the girls with "options... other than trouble." The goal of the visual arts component was to have them work together on a group project, creating a message for other girls dealing with similar personal issues. How difficult this was for our girls speaks to the painful gap between the goals we set for them and what they need.

Though I'm trained neither as an educator nor a therapist, I have confidence in my ability to relate to kids. I enjoy spending time in the South Bronx with my camera and have worked informally with youth groups. I trusted the other workshop leaders to address the more difficult psychological issues. Hired as a photographer, I determined to teach a technical skill and point my students in the right direction. The girls would create and collect images of their lives that dealt with the concerns of the grant. I made a list of subjects for them to choose. They could photograph their family, their daily life and special occasions, places they liked, things that made them happy or sad, a person they admired. I described many ways they could create self-portraits.

It was immediately suggested to me that I wouldn't be able to get through much of the list and that I not offer my students a choice of subject, but assign one. Indeed, a list of possibilities did confuse them at first. They weren't sure what I wanted them to do. Not that it got in the way of their seizing disposable cameras and reporters' notebooks like the starving at a banquet. They considered my list of suggested subjects. Some of them even kept it. It soon became apparent however that each girl had her own agenda. Providing independence within a structured environment gave me my first lessons in dealing with the contradictory demands for attention and privacy that alternate unexpectedly in the teenage heart.

My students were strongly attracted to the camera--as subjects. When someone photographed them, they said "I took a picture." They were only too happy to pose. When I protested that they were supposed to be taking the pictures, they replied, "But you're the photographer!" True enough. My project became to move them from the subject to the author of the image.

Pictures--regardless of who took them--were claimed eagerly by the subjects and disappeared into jealously guarded collections. It was difficult to persuade the girls to give up even one to hang on the wall. The boldest girl relinquished a few of hers "'cause I'm not in them." Duplicates would be bartered for a cupcake or a bag of chips, but displaying their pictures was not easy for them. They liked albums they could close. Frames were something to be taken home. I only got to see their photos when I insisted, which I didn't do often. They shared their work more easily with the other members of my team--a high school student from the community and art therapist Karen Rehm, who volunteered to help me in addition to conducting her own workshops. I was in the teacher's role, from which these girls remained painfully disconnected.

I took their overwhelming eagerness to claim the envelope back from the lab as a good enough measure of involvement. I taught each day's lesson--Photo Basics, How To Photograph Kids, How to Take a Group Shot-before I handed them out. My girls were not interested in the mechanics of photography. When books by women photographers lay untouched in the center of the table, I opened them in front of the least recalcitrant student. If she showed some interest the others would ask her to describe what she saw. Books about girls their age were not plentiful. Perhaps that's why pictures of girls their age interested them less than images of celebrities. Too many magazines contained sexually explicit articles. Some guile was needed to introduce even the most appropriate. One morning B. took the copy of Vibe I offered her and slammed it face down on the table. When the art therapist picked it up however, B. almost tipped over her chair trying to look over her shoulder.

They were fascinated by teens as the picture on page one, so I was happy when the local paper photographed one group, even though I wasn't around for the shoot. The copy I brought to class was greeted with an angry chorus of "We've seen it! We're not in the paper!" Rather than a group shot, there was a picture of one girl. "I'm glad it wasn't me" someone growled. I tried to explain to them that the photographer doesn't decide which photos appear. "But the other woman was here!" they insisted. Yes, but she was the writer. The editor makes the decisions. I talked about things you can and can't control, but they were inconsolable. We didn't discuss the text, which declared all the girls in the program at risk of delinquency.