Bonnie Blagojevic's List: Young Photographers

• Book Review: I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography to Kids

  • Want to review this book again.

• we’re living in a visual culture
• benefits of positive visual stimulation
• Even very young children, when encouraged, have the ability to express   their complex emotional lives visually.
• until the second or third grade a child’s predominant   means of self-expression is drawing.
• But when they’re   just beginning to write, they often rely on their drawings rather   than their writing to convey the meaning of the story.
• the need to attend   to our neglected physical and visual surroundings
• and the need we   all feel to articulate and communicate something relevant about our   personal and communal lives.
• thirty years of thinking about how we learn, and how   we express ourselves with images.
• when I demonstrated   how the camera worked to the people I wanted to photograph, everyone,   myself included, felt more at ease.
• Their desire to be photographed was as strong as their desire to photograph.
• The children’s pictures were more complicated and disturbing   than mine — and, I began to realize, much closer to what it   felt like to be there.
• Merton’s photograph reflects that fear.
• Their pictures and writings made for   an uncompromising look at the problems they faced.
• 
    It’s unlikely that the young people would ever have written   what they did without the pictures to prompt them (Kathy’s writing   came from the beautiful landscape photographs she’d made), and   the pictures would have been difficult to decipher without the stories   to accompany them.
• their photo-essays were a starting   point for acknowledging and discussing, in their own voices, a very   tough predicament. (
• how photography   and writing stimulated one another. Many of the students I worked   with had trouble writing; they would labor painfully over a sentence   or two. But when they worked from a photograph that had something   to do with their own lives, especially a picture they had taken themselves,   they were able to write more — and what they wrote about was   their own experiences.
• Asking them to write about the subject they were going   to photograph, then asking them to make a list of images suggested   by their writing — this was a way to help them organize their   picture-taking before they went out to shoot.
• These children had never seen each other’s neighborhoods, certainly   not each other’s homes or families. They were essentially strangers   to each other.
• When the students brought back pictures of their families and communities,   each child tried to explain what was going on in the pictures, and   the others eagerly asked questions.
• teachers rarely come from the same community as their   students. Photographs can give them a glimpse into their students’   lives.
• Photography is perhaps the most democratic visual art of our time.   For most of us, picture taking is a part of our family lives. We don’t   need a particular talent, like the hand-eye coordination necessary   for drawing, to render what we look at. Even children and adults unfamiliar   with photography can make photographs of what they see and imagine.   For those of us who have used cameras, photography offers a language   that can draw on the imagination in a way we may never have thought   possible before.

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