They start out shy and skeptical.
“Who are you, and why are you pointing that camera at me?” their faces seem to ask.
Then comes a click and a flash followed by more clicks and flashes until kid after kid is basking in the photographer’s attention.
It’s picture day at Children’s Garden Montessori School in Denver, and 65 2- to 5-year-olds have come today looking extra spiff.
Collin Butler chose his favorite Batman T-shirt.
Delaney Untermeyer and her big sister Natalie are wearing dresses their grandma sewed them.
And Maris McPheeters has on her super-sparkly sneakers.
They line up on benches, swinging their feet and waiting to be called by the stranger with the goatee, kneepads and camera.
“Maris. Which one of you is Maris?” photographer Eric Bakken calls out as the 2-year-old approaches his makeshift studio space, staring modestly down at what she calls her “most specialestest shoes.”
Bakken, a former kindergarten and second-grade teacher, knows what to do. “Jump, Maris,” he says.
Maris jumps up and lands with a grin. Click.
“Good, Maris, keep jumping,” Bakken tells her.
Maris jumps higher, then higher again, each time with a bigger smile until — click — she’s giggling for the camera.
In the course of three or four minutes, Bakken manages to draw nearly every kid out of his or her doubts.
He asks about their big sisters and baby brothers, their bikes and scooters or what they had for lunch. He wipes their mouths and pulls back their hair.
With the nose-pickers, he urges them to remove their fingers. With the song-singers, he breaks out with “The Wheels on the Bus” and “On Top of Old Smoky.” And with the daydreamers, he pulls out his giraffe puppet or asks, simply, “Do you by chance have a bunny?”(a question that, as it turns out, preschoolers find incredibly funny).
Whichever of his tricks, Bakken’s goal doesn’t vary.
“In a matter of seconds, I need to figure out what this child needs to look at me, really look at me so that I can see them the way their parents see them,” he says.
These are the children of the digital age. Even the youngest are so accustomed to having pictures taken that they seem schooled on how to sit, stand and smile.
Bakken’s work undoes that.
The results are moments of suspended animation that are less about the brightness of a girl’s sundress or the crispness of a boy’s khakis than who she or he is, unposed, bed-headed and still so young.
Looking through hundreds of his proofs, each series of shots unfolds much the same way. Fear becomes curiosity. Vulnerability turns into wonder. Out of some kids — such as Julian Kramer, 2, whose eyes question deep into Bakken’s lens — come moments of striking dignity. Out of others — such as Vivian Leuthold, 4, twirling around in her black party dress — come images of ageless grace.
Prints will be made and sent on to relatives. They’ll be stuck with magnets onto refrigerators and flashed proudly from grandparents’ wallets. And they’ll be framed by moms and dads who will gaze at them years from now and wonder where the time went and how their babies grew up so fast.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
