VENICE : Photo Class Gives Youths a Positive Image

Photographer Ed Goldstein never thought he’d find poetry when he asked a class of juvenile offenders to shoot each other--with Polaroid cameras.

But Goldstein says he discovered the soul of a poet in one of his students, who had taken a series of close-up silhouettes of a classmate. The student said that in the images he saw “an angel looking down over a man, giving him her blessing before she goes back up to heaven, where the door she came through is closing slowly.”

“It’s amazing what I see come out of their imaginations,” said Goldstein, a professional photographer who taught two-week photography workshops to young offenders housed at Camp Miller and Camp Kilpatrick in the Malibu hills.

The workshop, dubbed “Close Up: Face to Face,” was offered through the Arts & Children Project sponsored by Venice-based L.A. Theatre Works, the Los Angeles County Probation Department and the Juvenile Court School Division of the Los Angeles County Board of Education.

The 10-year-old project has brought hundreds of special arts workshops, including painting, dance and theater, into schools at Los Angeles County camps and juvenile halls, which house up to 4,600 inmates.

The juveniles are in custody for offenses that include murder, rape, robbery and theft. Organizers say they believe the workshops may help the youths stay out of trouble when they are released.

“When they look at someone (from) across the street, across the yard, the don’t really see each other,” Goldstein said. “When they’re close up, they fool around, they’re interacting, they’re human. This may be an extreme example, but before they pull the trigger, they (will) see the other person as human.”

During a class at Camp Miller, a low-security facility housing youths ages 16 to 18, Goldstein gave a slide show to make them see the world differently before they moved on to take portraits of each other and analyze them.

Shown a slide in which an image of Earth is superimposed over the jaws of a wrench, one student said the photographer was making a statement that “something man-made is going to destroy the Earth.”

Another called out his interpretation: “Fix the government.”

Another shot--a close-up of water droplets on a leaf--prompted a rash of responses: One student saw a saxophone, another the moon and Milky Way and still another Ethiopia.

After lessons in photography, the students snapped pictures of each other with Polaroids.

Looking at a picture he took of a camp mate, student Tylon said he saw former world heavyweight boxing champion Evander “Holyfield after he got beat on. Volcanoes, as if I were high in the sky. The eyes of a crook tryin’ to be slick.”

In interviews, several students said they enjoyed the workshop and prefer the camp school--nestled in a valley in the Santa Monica Mountains--to their neighborhood high schools. (Kilpatrick, next to Miller, is a higher-security facility that houses 120 offenders ages 13 to 15).

“The teachers on the outside are different. They don’t care,” said Eric, 16, of South-Central Los Angeles.

Mark Lewis, who has taught in the juvenile schools for 17 years, acknowledged that some of the offenders will end up back in custody after they are released. About 40% to 60% of the juveniles, depending on their age and the facility to which they were assigned, commit another offense after their release, according to the Probation Department.

Still, he said, workshops like the one given by Goldstein help. “What he’s bringing them is how to look at things differently, that there’s more to life than a two-block-by-two-block area that they feel safe in.”

Said Gloria Newell, principal of the camps: “I felt it’s very important to integrate the arts into the curriculum, to give them choices. Let’s do something positive, creative, with their energy.”

Gale Cohen, managing director of L.A. Theatre Works, says some offenders go into careers in the arts. But more importantly, she says, the workshops give the offenders a forum for positive self-expression and help them see past gang culture to a broader society.

“When you see the projects completed, you know you’ve had success,” she said. “If it wasn’t working out, it wouldn’t be supported by educators.”

Meanwhile, back in the classroom, students talked about images flashed on the wall: enlargements of pollen and dust, a close-up of a housefly’s head, a tribesman whose face is smeared with paint.

“Ed (Goldstein) is trying to get you to see things in a different way,” Lewis tells the students at the end of the class. “And that’s what you need to do about yourselves too. If you leave this place the same way you came in, nothing changes.”