Seeing From the Heart : Photography: Jana Taylor teaches disadvantaged Venice children the fundamentals of working with a camera. Her students also learn to focus on the positive aspects of their lives.
Children are big in photographer Jana Taylor’s life.
Her Venice studio is dominated by their 4-by-6-foot portraits, purposely hung high to accord them the proper respect from adults, who must look up rather than down at them.
Taylor’s vision of children has made her a nationally recognized photographer who commands thousands of dollars per session.
But it is her vision for children rather than of them that motivates her to gather a group of disadvantaged Venice children around a table each Friday afternoon to teach them about photography and much more.
The lesson is “seeing from the heart,” said Taylor in an interview. “It’s all about teaching the goodness and beauty of life.”
That would seem to be an uphill battle given the lives some of the children in her classes lead. One has a father in jail, and another reported that she was ordered by her mother to shoot a puppy for the family dinner.
Fifty children a week troop through her studio, where they find and express their inner vision through photography. The children learn to develop the photos, as well as take them. She recently started offering dance, acting and creative reading.
The program is part of Taylor’s American Child Foundation, which she formed in 1983 to further her quest to nurture the natural artist she sees in each child.
Though Nikon, Kodak and Polaroid donate equipment and the Coca-Cola Co. donates money, Taylor has spent more than $50,000 of her own money to finance the foundation. The program costs a minimum of $5,000 a month to operate.
Taylor’s next goal is to raise money for a center in Venice, the American Child Institute of Fine Arts, to serve many more children than she can now accommodate. It would partially support itself and raise scholarship money by selling greeting cards designed by children.
Taylor describes the children as natural artists, who possess an awe-inspiring bravery and “the absolute desire to be good and do good. . . . I’m telling them to rebel against the negative. They don’t have to accept that as reality.”
When Taylor started teaching photography to children at Para los Ninos child-care center near Skid Row several years ago, she asked the impoverished children to identify what was beautiful in their lives. Nothing, they replied. But under Taylor’s tutelage, they discovered that beauty can be found everywhere--in the light shining on a kitchen table or the bird outside the window.
Or in 10-year-old Carmen Herrera’s case, her own foot, captured against billowy clouds outside a car window. The photo brought the fifth-grader $35 when it was sold at a Venice art festival last summer, Carmen said proudly at a recent class.
At a recent class, Taylor gave Carmen and the others enlarged copies of their photographs for Christmas. The Westminster Elementary School fifth-grader painstakingly affixed her signature in the right-hand corner of the border, just like any other artist.
Carmen said she loved taking photos because “you get to express your feelings in the pictures.”
Her grandmother, Rose Herrera, said Carmen’s life has been brightened by the class. “It has opened her eyes to many things she had never looked at before.” Additionally, Carmen is more interested in her schoolwork and has overcome her shyness in speaking to adults, Herrera said.
Taylor said Carmen’s response to the class is common, as children who learn to see the beauty in their lives also learn to appreciate the beauty in themselves. “The kids think their lives are better. They blossom,” Taylor said. “It’s a terrible value judgment for (society) to say they have nothing because they have no money.”
Though Taylor admits to being a Pollyanna, she said she runs a tight class with professional standards. She tells the children that “photography changed my life” and that it can change theirs too.
Taylor, a former actress who was a regular on the soap opera “General Hospital” and a guest star on numerous television programs, retired from show business to raise her son, now 14. After a divorce, she was looking for a way to support herself and her son when she started taking photos.
A cinematographer friend provided her first lesson in technique: Make sure the needles inside the camera’s viewer line up. Yet, despite her initial lack of technical knowledge, her pictures were a hit. “People wanted my pictures because they were heartfelt,” she explained. A star-studded clientele followed.
As her career blossomed, Taylor was quizzed about her “technique.” A friend advised a standard reply: that she “was an intuitive photographer and did not discuss her technique.”
As she gathered her class around her recently, Taylor talked to the children about what makes a person great, gleaning answers ranging from truthfulness to loyalty. The class then watched a film in which the late photographer Ansel Adams discussed his work, echoing some of the lessons Taylor had been imparting.
“I’d take that picture,” exclaimed one student as Adams and the late artist Georgia O’Keeffe strolled across a desert landscape.
The high point of the class was when the children, who are 10 to 12 years old, saw their own proof sheets from earlier assignments. They excitedly passed around the magnifying loop to see each frame in black and white, giggling, moaning and proudly sharing their favorite shots with each other.
Taylor looked at the sheets, too, praising the work. It is a cardinal rule of her class that there is no criticism of the photos from her or the other students, though there is much feedback.
One of the students, Matthew Gomez, a sixth-grader, gave the class the ultimate compliment from someone in the video generation. “It makes me get up and not sit around the house watching TV.”