CAMERA WORK BRINGS KIDS INTO FOCUS

BALTIMORE - April 17, 2007—The three of them stand atop this crumbling brick structure around 22nd and Barclay in Baltimore City, arms folded across their pip-squeak chests, heads cocked, postures pretty defiant. Look at us, they seem to say. Look how tough we are, look how bad we are, look how we’ve already learned the self-protective mannerisms of the street.

So Norman Handy looks. He is a fifth-grader at Dallas Nicholas Elementary School, and on this chilly Saturday afternoon a few weeks back, he’s arrived on the second floor of the Load of Fun Art Gallery, on North Avenue near Howard Street, to gaze with mixed emotions at a photo exhibit called Kids and Cameras: Views of Baltimore.

The picture of the three kids was taken by Handy. And he doesn’t like what he sees.

“They’re posing,” he says. “And I don’t like the pose.”

“Why not?” a guy asks.

“These are some of my best friends,” he says. “But they’re acting like they’re gangsters or something.” He shakes his head at the pretending. “Like they’re selling drugs and acting like they’re big and bad.”

“Right, big and bad,” says Troy Robinson, sidling next to Handy to study the photograph. Robinson is a classmate at Dallas Nicholas Elementary. His photos also are displayed at the gallery, and his images likewise reflect the world around him: the Barclay-Midway area, roughly bordered by North Avenue on the south, 25th Street on the north, Calvert Street on the west and Greenmount Avenue on the east.

“I like my neighborhood,” says Robinson. Then he thinks about this for a moment, as he scans the dozens of photos on the walls. “Well, not really,” he says, looking up at a visitor. “You got the gangs around there. I hear a shooting, I gotta put my head down and get down on the ground, ’cause I sure don’t want to get hurt.”

The two of them, Handy and Robinson, are 12 years old, an age when the temptations of the street begin to arrive in their lives. They’re growing up in a city where it’s not always easy to be 12 years old, in a neighborhood where children occasionally get hurt.

Beth Rossi and Aditi Mehta enter this world from a different place. Rossi, 22, grew up in suburban Baltimore, did graduate work in history at the University of Pennsylvania and now works as a legal assistant for a Washington law firm.

Mehta, 22, grew up in Boston, attended Cornell for urban and regional studies, now lives in Washington and works as an assistant projects manager for Telesis, a community-development firm.

They met in Germany while on fellowships with Humanity in Action, a human-rights organization, and were inspired to take on a community project. Back in the United States, they raised grant money from Humanity in Action and received additional funding from Telesis.

The idea was simple: Give cameras to several kids, 11 and 12, and let them shoot pictures in their neighborhood. They hoped the idea would appeal to any artistic instincts the kids might have. Also, their work might offer a unique reflection of the world in which these kids sometimes thrive and sometimes don’t.

“We wanted a neighborhood with a lot of spirit,” says Mehta, “and we went through the Barclay area and found Dallas Nicholas Elementary. We were very moved by what we saw: the energy of the neighborhood, the dedicated teachers at the school, the activism in the community. And, also, some of its troubles.”

They met with Nate Tatum, director of school initiatives for Dallas Nicholas Elementary, who gave the project a go-ahead. In late February, Rossi and Mehta met with the youngsters: Handy, Robinson, Danielle Scott, Brian Anderson and Damond Drake.

“We told them, ‘Take pictures of your lives,’ ” says Rossi.

Then they showed them how to use a camera — disposable point-and-shoot models — and practiced taking pictures.

“There were pictures of people making funny faces,” says Rossi, “and action shots. There was a homeless man at a gas station. All kinds of different pictures, telling stories, showing emotions. We asked them what they were thinking when they took the pictures.”

But the real answers they sought — how life is perceived through the eyes of a youngster in a sometimes-difficult neighborhood — came back in the photos, and in the captions the kids wrote for them.

Norman snapped a little girl sitting on a curb with her hands covering her face. The picture is titled “Cold and Lonely Girl.” Handy’s caption declares, “The girl is seven. She didn’t want her picture taken ... She has no one to play with, and it was cold outside that day.”

And there are other chilling images: A boy lies in the street, eyes closed, arms extended. Around him is a chalk outline — the kind made by police when they mark the spot of a killing. The boy is mimicking a scene he’s witnessed before. In another photo, bricks are piled in a little yard behind a row house where construction workers are laboring.

“It is good to have these houses fixed up,” says Handy’s caption, “because it gives people jobs, and if the houses are not fixed, junkies go in, and the building can catch on fire.”

Brian’s photos capture some of the same elements. There’s a shot of his friend Norman edging his way around a caged dog. “Norman isn’t afraid of anything,” Anderson’s caption says. “Neither is the dog. I am fearless, but I don’t know that dog.”

But some of his photos are more personal, and more tender. There are several shots of Anderson’s mother. “This is Mom before she got her braids,” he writes. “She looks excited, and I wanted to capture that. When my Mom is happy, I am happy. When my Mom is mad, I am mad.”

The kids’ photos were first exhibited at North Avenue’s Load of Fun Art Gallery in March. Then they were shown for several weeks at the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Central Branch. Through May 6, they’re on display at Greg’s Bagels, at the Belvedere Shopping Center, and from May 7 to May 20 they’ll be displayed at Joe’s Pizza and Bar, 133 W. North Ave.

At the opening exhibit, Danielle Scott, 12, looked over her photos with an artist’s critical eye. She liked some of the lighting, she said. But she wasn’t sure she liked what the photos were telling her. In one, there’s a row of swings on a playground and a little boy swinging. There’s no one else around.

“It’s like he’s playing with imaginary friends,” says Danielle. In another shot, people have dumped trash in an alley. “People who live here don’t dump their trash,” she says. “But these other people don’t care about our neighborhood.”

So there’s loneliness, and there’s blight. But there’s joy in these photographs, as well: Brian’s shot of women gossiping at the hairdresser’s, Troy’s study of his grandmother reading a storybook to his little nephew, Damond Drake’s shot of a boy on a sliding board.

And another kind of joy: the look on these kids’ faces when they saw their photos on display, and the crowd of people who came to see them.

“I think it’s been an enriching experience for all of us,” Mehta says.

“It was a chance for the kids in this neighborhood to say something to others,” says Rossi. “To share their perceptions of their community, of their families and of their lives. They saw things we missed. In one shot, there’s a picture of a flower, and one of the kids said, ‘How can you have a garden by a trash can?’ ”

Sometimes, that’s a pretty good metaphor for the precarious balance of city life. Even in the grubbiest spots, there’s a flower waiting to be discovered by a child.

Michael Olesker
The Examiner, Examiner.com
April17, 2007