Picture This: A Club That Brings Focus To Kids’ View Of The World

By Martha Coville

Newtown Middle School art teacher Arlene Spoonfeather was delighted by student response to the photography club she piloted this fall. She began the program after one of her students expressed an interest in photography.

Ms Spoonfeather said that she started the program after a single student wrote that he wanted to learn more about photography. She explained that she requires all her students to keep a journal, so that “they can reflect on their progress throughout the school year.” Ms Spoonfeather said that this year she made her students a promise: she promised to reply to every single journal entry they wrote.

So when eighth grader Conor Hartgraves wrote that he was really interested in photography, Ms Spoonfeather said she wrote back and asked, “How about we set up a photography club?”

Student response was encouraging. Ms Spoonfeather sent out an announcement, and was thrilled when 25 students showed up for the first club meeting. She designed a short, intensive program introducing students to the basics of photography. She said, “We met eight times [over eight weeks], and each time I gave them a different assignment.”

Assignments ranged from portraiture to nature photography. For Halloween, the club took a field trip to a local cemetery, where they learned the importance foreground and background play in composition. Other assignments included taking a picture of an object in the school, so that no one would recognize it as familiar, and taking “a picture of something really ugly, that you don’t think is ugly.”

Ms Spoonfeather told her students that her main interest was in composition. Her focus comes through clearly in students’ photographs. Their pictures, neatly glued to black matte board, show carefully positioned figures and shadows, bright fruits from farmers’ markets, arranged just so, and landscapes photographed with particular attention to foreground and background.

Conor, whose journal entry prompted Ms Spoonfeather to create the club, said that his interest in photography originated in his love for the natural world. He said the first images he wanted to capture were those he saw “on hikes with my family, because we’re just nature people.” Conor grew up hiking with his family, and has hiked trails in other parts of the country during family vacations. He said, “Once, I said, ‘Grandma, can I use your camera?’ and [the pictures] I took just came out great.”

Another eighth member of the photography club, Kory Kling, said he also took his first pictures during family vacations. He said, “When I was younger, when we went of vacation, I always asked for a [disposable] digital camera so I could take pictures.”

Conor, the nature lover, and Kory, who recorded his family vacations, gravitate to different subjects. Conor said, “I like to do mostly nature [pictures]. Nothing that has to do with manmade things.”

One of his pictures, which he had taken during a hiking vacation in South Caroline, looks down on a waterfall flowing into a broad river. Waterfalls are a common image in popular photograph, to the point that often appear trivialized, but there is nothing sentimental or romanticized in Conor’s picture. Conor places the waterfall toward the upper right hand corner, so that the picture focuses on the wide, still river dividing a track of forest in two. It is full of respect for the natural world as whole. By focusing on the quiet river, surrounded by tall trees, Conor contextualizes the waterfall. The picture becomes is a straightforward record of a particular forest, at a particular time of year, when a full river runs through a forest full of tall pines and lush, leafy trees.

While Conor defined his interest in photography by subject, Ms Spoonfeather described Kory’s pictures in terms of their tone. She said, “Kory has a great sense of humor; it’s more a sense of wit that comes through [his photographs]. He’s very lighthearted.” In one of his pictures, Kory stands in the middle of the graveyard, in green grass almost ankle high. There are weatherworn gravestones with curved tops in the background, but a shadow draws the eye down past the center, and straight to the foremost part of the picture. It is Kory, his shadow a slightly elongated by the afternoon sun. He has taken the picture with his right hand, and holds up a peace sign with his left. The effect is one of spontaneity.

Ms Spoonfeather said that she “definitely” plans on leading another photography club in the fall. But she also explained, “Someone asked me what I’d taught my students, [but] I don’t think I taught them anything.” Instead, she said, students learned from experience, and from sharing their pictures with each other.