Developing Photographs and Cultural Pride : Education: For teacher Gina Torres, shooting pictures is more than an art form. It can also help break down ethnic barriers.

A small boy beams out from the picture, wearing a pint-size cowboy hat and proudly strumming a miniature guitar.

The photo, by graduating Santa Ana High School senior Eddy Ayala, offers a perspective of the city of Santa Ana beyond its reputation for crime and urban decay.

“Our place is stereotyped as full of violence and a lot of gang activity,” Ayala, 17, said. “So I just said to my little brother, ‘Let me photograph you with your guitar.’ The picture showed that a little boy could find joy in a place that is stereotyped as a depressed place--could actually smile.”

Nearly 200 students from Santa Ana High School scoured their neighborhoods to record images of their community for a contest sponsored by Main Photo in Santa Ana. Thirty-five of their photos were selected for display at the photo store.

The students shot laborers at work and elderly residents with lucid smiles and knowing eyes. They looked for a striking swatch of scenery, like a flock of crows perched in the tangled branches of a city tree. They captured the city as they see it, and in doing so, examined what those images tell them about their environment and themselves.

The body of work the students have entered in the contest is the most recent endeavor of Santa Ana High School art teacher Gina Torres, an award-winning photography instructor who has been with the district 19 years.

As a teacher at Spurgeon Intermediate School and then at the high school, Torres has organized photography projects that link aesthetics to cultural pride and teach students as much about themselves as about darkrooms and developers.

“I came into it as a class I could take for fun, but I got more into the technique and critique of the work,” said graduating senior Tony Hernandez, 17, who took Torres’ class last year. “It brought out things in me I didn’t know I had. I didn’t know how much I could love art, or get into art. Each picture tells a story.”

But the exhibit marks an end, too. Torres, 54, retires this year and will move to El Paso, Tex., with her husband, who recently retired. She plans to remain in education, offering private photography lessons and developing textbooks based on her own photography and writing.

“I like the spontaneity of every day being different,” she said. “The kids make me laugh. . . . I was always open to not only teaching, but also learning from them.”

*

Torres was born in El Paso and moved to California in 1962. Although she showed an artistic bent in high school and even won a scholarship, she didn’t pursue higher education until she was 27 and already a mother. Taking a class a semester, she earned her bachelor’s degree in art in 1975 and a teaching credential the following year. She later earned two master’s degrees in education and administration.

“I constantly emphasized education,” she said of her years teaching photography. She wanted her students to be “very well read.”

That priority informed Torres’ approach to photography not only as an art, but also as a form of social documentary and intercultural communication. At the intermediate school, her classes comprised students from all corners of the world.

“I had maybe seven languages in my classroom,” she said. “I noticed that the different groups, the Vietnamese, the Laotian, the Hispanic and black children, would all cluster together.”

To break down those walls, she paired students with partners of a different ethnicity and assigned them to photograph and interview each other, then present oral and written reports on the project.

“All of a sudden you would see a Mexican student with a Vietnamese student as friends, because they had learned about each other and were now communicating,” Torres said.

But in her efforts to transcend stereotypes she also caught some disturbing glimpses of the prejudices her students held about themselves.

“At the high school level I noticed my students had a very poor self-image. They had problems with identity. Especially second-generation students. They were very confused about what they represented.

“I learned about that by how they saw themselves in photos,” she said. “They would say, ‘Oh, don’t leave me so long in the developing! I’m going to come out dark.’ They wanted to look white. I would ask them, ‘What is wrong with being dark?’ ”

Realizing that they needed a way to see themselves in a clearer light, she designed a project called Vision Beyond Limits, in which students critiqued images of minorities in the media, and then shot and exhibited their own photos to counter those.

After that came an exhibit called “Viva La Mujer,” photos of Latinas shot by the girls in her classes, and “In Search of Wisdom,” which took students to senior citizens’ homes to photograph and interview the elderly.

During her career, Torres also designed a program to prevent high-risk students from leaving school by counseling them about their problems at home.

Torres has won several honors within the school district, as well as an award for education from the American Red Cross and a cultural diversity award from Nordstrom.

“She was a counselor to me, she was a mother to me, she was a friend to me,” said Sahara Navarro, 21, a former student of Torres, who now attends Rancho Santiago College.

Barbara Snyder, who taught English as a second language at Santa Ana High, said Torres is “the perfect model for Hispanic girls and boys. She’s not only broken the glass ceiling, but the adobe ceiling.”