Each third Thursday the Albuquerque Museum stages a big free evening event featuring live music, multiple exhibitions and various performances. This one included a young woman walking around on scarily tall stilts. What I mostly came for this time, however, was the opportunity to learn more about the public school photography program which puts on the yearly Focus On Youth exhibition. The handout we got at the door read:
Meet the Artists
5:00--7:00 p.m
Meet student artists and hear about their work and creative process.
When we arrived in the gallery there was just a guard and a couple visitors viewing the pictures. We decided to get something to eat in the museum's restaurant and then. returned to the gallery a little after 6:00. By then there were quite a few people viewing the photo prints and I found three students standing beside their entries and ready to talk about them.
All three of the students had single prints in the "Non Digital" sections of the exhibition, which in this case meant film-based analog photography. The first that I talked to shared that his camera was a Pentax slr which he had gotten from a thrift store for twenty bucks. That was a nice conversation starter as I could share that I had bought a Pentax in 1969 which was my only camera for about twenty years.
All three of the photographers I spoke with showed pictures featuring people. The first fellow with the Pentax had made a nice portrait of a female friend. One young woman did a self-portrait using a hand-held simple camera, and another did a picture of a "best friend" at a distance. All three in discussing their class experience focused mostly on working in the darkroom to make the final prints. All expressed favorable opinions of the course experience and the preparation and expertise of their teacher.
I tried to elicit information about course content regarding photographic history and styles specifically referring to books, films and exhibits, but nothing came forth on those subjects beyond the students' own self-directed inquiry. About all I could safely conclude was that the students had gotten a good introduction to darkroom fundamentals and that the experience was overall satisfactory.
All three students I spoke with were from a single school and had the same teacher, so that left out a lot of what I was hoping to learn about the program which appears to be active in most or all of Albuquerque's high schools. The presence of at least one of the staff would have filled in a lot of blanks.
It seemed particularly unfortunate that there were no young photographers present to talk about the digital work on display since that is clearly the dominant mode now and for the foreseeable future. Here, for instance, is a picture by a young photographer who I would very much liked to have talked with.
And here is the credit beside the print:
That a picture of such technical excellence and emotional impact can be produced by a ninth grader seems extraordinary to me and demanding of some careful consideration.
While I was viewing the Focus on Youth exhibition Margaret was in the auditorium at the Youth Panel: Border Doors Project where the program announced "students discuss the stories and the ideas behind the Border Doors project." She said it was an excellent presentation. Perhaps next year the photography students might be given the opportunity to do something similar.
