Geographic Photographers Teach Teen Photo Workshop

Sean Markey
National Geographic News

August 6, 2003

View Students' Photos: Go >>

There's no shortage of fantasy camps these days. For a price, folks can learn guitar licks from rock-and-roll greats, shag flies with baseball Hall of Famers, or cook at the elbows of celebrity chefs.

But to aspiring photographers, Adassa Richardson, 18, probably enrolled in the best camp of all. Every Wednesday for five weeks this summer, Richardson attended Photo Camp 2003 at the National Geographic Society.

The workshop was offered for the first time this year as part of a paid summer internship program for inner-city high school students from Washington, D.C., known as the Learning/Employment/Adventure Program (LEAP), a decade-old initiative sponsored by the National Geographic Society Education Foundation.

During the course, students met National Geographic photographers, editors, and other guest speakers. They shot two to three rolls of a color film a week and kept a journal. Class time was spent discussing craft, critiquing photos, and, perhaps best of all, taking pictures in the field with visiting photographers. Students worked at internships in the Society's Image Collection, Expeditions Council, human resources department, and other divisions during the rest of the week.

So it was that on a drizzly Wednesday afternoon last month, Richardson and a dozen of her peers found themselves standing on the corner of 18th and N Street in downtown Washington, D.C.

With them were Sam Abell, a National Geographic Society Contributing Photographer-in-Residence with over 25 magazine assignments and nine books to his credit; Stephen Crowley, a New York Times photographer and recent Pulitzer Prize winner; and Kirsten Elstner, a former Times freelance photographer and the photo program's full-time instructor.

Zip Code 20036

The students were there to kick off their first day of shooting, try out their new Nikon point-and-shoot cameras, and get a feel for the subject of their five-week assignment: a portrait of the 20036 zip code, a 47-block chunk of downtown Washington that surrounds the National Geographic Society campus.

The neighborhood is home to flower shops, street vendors, subterranean subway stations, and other surprises tucked amid canyons of glass-walled office buildings.

How to capture that neighborhood would be a challenge for any shooter, let alone student photographers—some of whom have never owned a camera.

To help inspire and inform their efforts, Abell spoke with students earlier in the day about his own approach to his craft. He shared his belief that photography, like dancing and music, "takes you into life." Abell showed slides of Japanese gardens, Australian ranch hands, hard-luck cowboys, and dogs mugging for the camera.

He also described a favored technique: Compose a picture then wait for something to happen, preferably something unusual—a tip he learned from his father.

So to demonstrate, Abell now crouched beside a street lamp outside a Starbucks. Using a borrowed camera, he framed a sidewalk scene of traffic lights and pedestrians, explaining that skateboarders would come, followed by midgets on skateboards, to complete the picture.

"Look," he said, with a dash of theater. "There's a couple having a fight." A student begged to differ. "They're happy," Abell asked in mock disbelief, playing to his audience.

Still, his lesson was clear: Even an ordinary sidewalk becomes an ever-changing stage cast with surprising characters. The trick is to stop and watch for it—and have your camera ready.

The group then walked several blocks north to Dupont Circle, a broad park at the center of a busy traffic roundabout that draws dog-walkers, chess-players, idle bench-sitters, and harried pedestrians.

Abell bid students to approach the marble fountain that anchors the center of the park. Then he blocked out an imaginary frame with his hands, much like a director or tai chi master, and enjoined the class to walk backward with him until branches of the overarching willow oaks dipped pleasingly into the top of scene.

A moment passed. Then a woman in a powder blue, polyester pantsuit carrying a black umbrella strode through the imaginary frame.

"If I were doing this assignment, I'd make this my headquarters," Abell said approvingly. "There is a world happening off this circle."

Top Students

Abell, who never took a photography course in his life, said he would have "given anything" to attend the LEAP photo camp at the start of his career nearly 35 years ago. Now, it hardly seems necessary.

Students in the LEAP initiative are rather accomplished themselves. The seniors and college-bound freshmen come from public high schools that rank among the city's best academic and arts magnet programs. Students' extra-curricular activities include stints on high school newspapers, debating societies, soccer and basketball teams, student government, and honor societies.

Richardson starts classes at Stanford University this fall. Fellow graduates will attend the University of Virginia, Amherst College, and other leading schools around the country.

Asked what he thought of the photo camp, Johnny Valdez, 16, a keen science student who says he would like to study "anything ending in 'ology'" at a New York City college next year, answered: "I love it."

Lindsay Totty, 17, an aspiring writer and fan of Japanese animation who draws his own comic strip, "Lucky and Guy," said of the program: "It's been a pretty interesting experience, especially with the photojournalism camp."

"Sam Abell brought an interesting look at photography," said Totty, who heads to Amherst College this fall. "I didn't think that much was involved before. Now I know."

Kirsten Elstner served as the program's full-time instructor during its five-week run. A working freelance photographer herself, Elstner brought experience to the job, both as a photojournalist and as a teacher.

For the past two years, she's run Vision Workshops, an Annapolis, Maryland-based program she founded two years ago with New York Times colleagues Paul Hosefros and Stephen Crowley. The program teaches photography and writing skills to inner-city and minority youth from low-income and at-risk families.

Crowley said the LEAP photo camp can teach students skills that apply to how they live and view the world since "everything is a composition."

"If they can discover their inner creativity, find their own creative self through this program, they can take it anywhere," he said.

The admittedly shy Richardson said later she's learned a lot from the program: "I personally gained more courage to go up to people and say, OK, I'm going to take your picture [then] sit down and talk to people I'd normally walk by."

One can only wait to see what skills develop among next year's class.