Camera offers students a new way of seeing their neighborhood
When Geancarlo Jordan moved to the United States from Ecuador two years ago, his only experience with a camera was to point it at something and hit the shutter button.
But over the last four months, Jordan, 17, estimates he has taken thousands of photos as part of a new workshop at his school, which has pushed him not only to become a better photographer, but also to learn more about his adopted neighborhood.
He no longer relies on those basic point-and-shoot techniques.
Every picture that I take, I have to be inspired,” Jordan said.
Jordan’s photos, and those taken by 14 other students from the High School of World Cultures, were part of an exhibit called “Eyes and Angles: Our Life in the Bronx” at the Bronx Documentary Center, on Courtland Avenue at East 151st Street. The exhibit, sponsored by the non-profit Envision Foundation for Photography and Digital Media, prompts students to document their communities by photographing them.
Last semester, teachers showed students the fundamentals of photography in the school’s twice-a-week hands-on course.
First, the teachers assigned each student to create a self-portrait, followed by a portrait of one of their classmates. Then the students had to take a photo that told a story about their school.
James Estrin, a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer from The New York Times and co-founder of the Envision Foundation, said the purpose was to teach the teens to become active community participants.
“I see this not so much about photography,” Estrin said. “I want young people to feel like a part of their community.”
For a final project the instructors asked their students to go out and find the beauty in their neighborhood, an assignment that photography teacher Thérèse De Belder said was their most challenging.
Jordan took a blurred photo of a speeding train passing his subway stop. One student took a photo of a chain-link fence, another of a game of dominos.
For her fourth assignment, 16-year-old Crissel Concepcion from the Dominican Republic decided to tell a story about family. She followed her brother as he got a haircut.
“I was in the barbershop and I said, ‘Oh, let me just take a picture of you,’ “ Concepcion said. “And I just love it. I don’t know why.”
“It’s pushing them as photographers to get out of their comfort zones,” De Belder said. “That, for them, is a very big job.”
The partnership between the Envision Foundation and the High School of World Culture was set up by Replications, Inc., a non-profit organization that helps schools in under-served communities. After hearing Estrin’s plan, Principal Ramon Namnun decided to select students from the school’s multicultural class, which focuses on teaching students about globalization and cultural acceptance.
In addition to the Bronx school, the program is operating in Haiti and China, and three schools in Mexico will be added in the fall. Until now it has consisted of 45-minute workshops over a semester, but will soon be expanded into a year-long course of two-hour classes, in which each class will partner with a sister school in one of the other participating cities.
Pediatrician Nelly Maseda, 48, related to the way the students documented life in the city.
“I grew up with a single mother in Washington Heights,” Maseda said. “It’s not all houses in the suburbs and white picket fences.”
Portraying their community “clicked,” Namnun said, adding, “It gives the kids a different perspective.”
Nerys Jimenez, a 17-year-old student from the Dominican Republic, says she’s recognized that shift in perspective. Jimenez has been writing poetry her entire life, and had to learn how to communicate through photography the same way she does through her writing.
“What do I see? What do I want people to see?” Jimenez said. “When you write something, you have a lot of words, and you put them together. When you have a camera you do the same thing. You try and put a lot of different things into a photo.”
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