Through the eyes of babes.
I have no idea who Megan Zinke is. But her written response to “Building a Community,” an exhibit of children’s photography now on display at the Downtown YMCA, channeled my thoughts exactly.
“It is amazing to me that elementary-level kids have taken these pictures,” Zinke wrote in an informal review posted among the pictures. “The photographs are abstract in the sense that the scenes are items or visions that one wouldn’t normally think of.”
These fresh points of view give Denver a new dimension. The fact that most of them are in black and white adds a sense of awe. Black-and-white photography is about light as much as subject matter. Without contrast, an otherwise great scene turns into gray mush.
So when you see something like Joanna Hendricks’ portrait of a pair of bicycles chained to a rack in front of the Y, the beautifully captured shades of light and dark seem the stuff of art.
Then, you realize that Hendricks is a Mile High Girl Scout, not a professional photographer, and her work looks like genius.
Sort of like the intensely close-up, crisply focused shot of an unmown lawn by fourth-grader Marilyn Alford titled “The Grass in My Neighborhood” or fourth-grader Jose Aguilera’s perfectly lit “A Sculpture on the Fence at School.”
Hendricks, Alford, Aguilera and the other artists in the exhibit don’t talk about their pictures in such high-falutin’ terms.
“I liked the way it looked,” 10-year-old Terrance Thompson, a fifth-grader at Ashley Elementary, explains of his shot of two girls jumping rope with their shadows extended in front of them.
Terrance said his teacher “gave everyone a camera. They told me, ‘Take any picture you like. Just don’t break the camera.”‘
Ten-year-old Daniel Ramirez, a fourth-grader at Cowell Elementary, is a little more colorful.
“It impassioned me,” Ramirez said of his angular landscape featuring the tower of the Brooks Lofts near the Platte River Trail. “I picked the angle. From one angle it was so-so. From the other, I was inspired.”
Ramirez is among more than 15 elementary school photographers whose work will be on display in the Y’s lobby until April 4.
The lobby is open weekdays 6:15 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
You can buy what you like. Five bucks of the purchase price goes to a scholarship fund for the artist.
This eclectic vision of Denver was the brainchild of Madera Rogers, founder of The Entertainment Project Inc. Rogers’ group lists as its mission “to increase literacy skills in children by connecting them to real-world assignment and experiences.”
There’s plenty of reading and writing, Rogers said, but “we’ve been doing pictures since we started eight years ago. Most of these kids have an eye.”
In March 2002, the children took their visions to ground zero of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“Building a Community” sticks very close to home, but the exhibit still packs plenty of power.
Rogers said she gets a deal on black and white photo printing from Chuck Renstrom of Colorline in Lakewood. Renstrom is working from awfully good raw material. Everything makes up a community, Rogers said, from bricks and mortar to blades of grass. Nevertheless, the way certain things catch the untrained eye never ceases to amaze.
Fourth-grader Datrell Givens’ “Waiting to Play” is a picture of four sets of sneaker-clad feet with an unmolested white ball lying in the foreground.
“The Thing on the Playground” by fourth-grader Elizabeth Villia, turns out to be a detailed geometric study of a wire trash can.
“It’s all a part of the story,” Rogers likes to say.
This tale never seems to disappoint.
“Children,” Rogers said, “are pretty brilliant.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
