FRESH EYES : 100 Inner-City Students Were Given Disposable Cameras and Basic Instruction: Picture Their Lives

A child sits in a car, head tipped back to take in a familiar bit of urban symmetry--the echoing facade of an apartment complex. Rectangular entryways open onto small green patches of lawn and walkways. Shot from the back seat of a car, the photo of this scene gives a kid’s-eye view, as closely observed as a familiar face.

Like the other images that appear on the following pages, it’s the intimate and surprising result of giving 100 students three hours of instruction in photography, then turning them loose with disposable cameras to document their environments. “For a lot of kids, it was the first time they had their hands on a camera, let alone a chance to capture their own lives,” says Sharon Simpson, managing director in Watts of Los Angeles Cities in Schools, a dropout-prevention program that coordinated the project with students from five schools in South-Central L.A.

In class, students picked up photo basics like “how to stand so I wouldn’t have a shadow in front of me,” says Nia Mydra Tiggs, an 18-year-old senior at L.A. Achievement alternative high school. They also received instruction from six local photographers and gallery owners, who then selected student photos that would be included in a formal exhibition, “Wings of Change,” sponsored, as was this program, by Giorgio Beverly Hills.

For Tiggs, whose self-portrait is in the exhibition, the experience refined the picture-taking process. “I was just snapping before,” she says, “but I learned to magnify what I want and how I want it done.”

What came through in all the pictures was “a sense of approval,” says gallery owner G. Ray Hawkins, one of the judges. “In at least part of their life, there was a sense of well-being. They were able to see negative things and take pictures of them but at the same time to observe and not be trapped by them. You can beat kids into submission verbally--’Don’t talk back.’ But give them a camera, and sometimes it’s the same as giving them their constitutional rights.”

The winning photographs will be displayed through Dec. 8 at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles.