PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW : Young Faces of Little Hope : Poverty: Stephen Shames’ images of America’s children amount to a cry for help.

To see tomorrow’s problems, all we have to do is look at today’s children.

Photographer Stephen Shames has spent the past eight years taking a very hard look--and the images he has made are enough to send shudders down anyone’s spine.

Ralph, a 13-year-old boy, jumps lithely across wide gaps between rooftops in the Bronx. Eight stories up.

Lafayette, a much younger kid, stands humbly in the middle of a barren, graffiti-covered room in the Chicago building where he lives. He’s marking the spot where he saw a girl shot.

Max, a little boy about 4, kisses his sister Vanessa, a toddler, in a hallway in New York. He is her only baby-sitter.

Sylvia irons in the bedroom of the suburban El Paso, Tex., home she and her husband bought hoping to escape urban violence. Her son bathes in a metal tub in the adjacent kitchen--the developer who sold them the home never provided plumbing. Above Sylvia’s head hangs an image of Christ wearing a crown of thorns, asking implicitly, who’s suffering here?

Shames’ pictures were first assembled as a book titled “Outside the Dream: Child Poverty in America” published in 1991 by Aperture and the Children’s Defense Fund. They currently are the subject of an exhibition by the same name that opened this week at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts.

Each work, made between 1984 and 1989, is accompanied by a very short text identifying the circumstances and location of the subject. These pictures, however, give voice to a full-fledged chorus of cries for help.

From the murders--and there are a few juvenile murderers here--to the children whose only meals are from handouts, the show asks one universal question: What is wrong with these pictures?

So many obvious subsequent questions come to mind: How were these kids forgotten? How were they allowed to become so hardened so young?

To their credit, given the power of the subjects, Shames’ compositions speak with an inherent modesty. It would be so easy to overplay the tears or wounds of these children, to exploit their weaknesses for aesthetic profit. But, throughout the 100 photos here, Shames never does. He has entered family homes, walked into lives, gotten close to blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos, and he’s shown them with an empathy and honesty that dignifies both them and the work.

He lets us get to know his subjects as very human beings. He reminds us of the fragility of their hold on life.

Shames, who has been published widely as a journalist photographer, is not just a documentarian, he is also an artist. His pictures capture drama: They show the joy of a kid’s goofing for the camera, the intimacy of a teen-age mom holding her son. It is the obvious rapport that the subjects have with the photographer--the trust he has earned--that make a difference here. This work has none of the voyeurism that could so easily have corrupted its message.

Shames judges the circumstances within the images, but he doesn’t judge the kids. This is true of a boy shown wearing a winter coat while doing his homework at a picnic table because his family has no home. It is just as true of another boy getting shot up with a hypodermic.

Both images are chilling and, in this context, they point beyond the violence and tragedy to the traps that these children cannot avoid. They get very little care and guidance because their parents aren’t rich enough to have the luxury of just being around.

There is no question that the ideal nuclear family is not in the cards for these youths--but the reasons differ in many cases. Labels tell us that some of the parents work but still can’t afford child care. And some are dead. Either way, these kids are self-educated in lessons they probably never wanted to learn.

Shames’ project includes both individual portraits and series. One large sequence taken in McGrath State Park in Ventura County shows an otherwise-homeless family of seven living in a 6-by-13-foot trailer on the beach. At the time Shames shot them, they and another 11 families with a total of 35 children were living semi-permanently under such conditions, although park regulations required them to pack up and move every 14 days--only to return again. It took the families a full year of asking the local school board to have school buses stop at the park just to pick the kids up to get them to school.

Shames shot some of his series over time--he spent as much as four weeks with some subjects. Others just took a day. One of these quickies is also one of the creepiest: Shames was invited into the home of a couple whose violence and abuse toward one another was totally uninhibited by his presence. With a young child sleeping by them on a bed in one picture, the mother makes an obscene gesture with her hand at her husband. This image is followed by eight more, chronicling what looks like a series of violent fights. First he throws her down, then he throws her over his shoulder. It’s hard to imagine how Shames felt watching this happen, and it’s harder still to believe they would do it in front of him.

The point is, though, that the couple’s children witness this stuff as a matter of course. Often enough to sleep through it.

Shames offers no redemption from any of the violence shown throughout the works exhibited here; who could expect him to? This is life, not the movies. But his connection to the Children’s Defense Fund and his book’s afterword by Defense Fund president and founder, Marian Wright Edelman, demonstrate that his goal is to introduce us to the challenge of changing these children’s lives.

His is a worthy cause, and this show cannot help but make a difference. For that alone, it is worth seeing.

* Stephen Shames “Outside the Dream: Child Poverty in America” continues at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego’s Balboa Park through Aug. 23. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, Thursdays until 9 p.m. Admission is $3. Call 238-7559 for information.