“My grammar school life and my high school life has been the pits. I’m the kid the system lost. I’m the kid that slipped through the cracks. When I was in kindergarten, I knew everything. They wanted to put me in second grade because I already knew how to read. When I was going to first grade in a new school, they just saw my last name . . . and saw it was Hispanic and they stuck me in bilingual classes. Yeah, that’s the funny part. I learned Spanish in school.
“I love to write and I even stopped writing. I’m doing OK now but I would have pushed harder. I should have insisted they provide me with a better education.”
-Maria Jaime, a student at Morton East High School in Cicero, talking while her photographic portrait was being taken
About three years ago, Kathleen Fischer, a photography teacher at Morton East High School, saw that her students had two things in common that could be used as a photography project:
First, they loved taking portraits of themselves. One student told her that seeing his picture made him feel immortal. There he was, frozen in time, by the click of the shutter.
Second, they loved talking while they were in the photo studio or lab.
“The conversations would be so fascinating,” Fischer said. “They would just get started, talking about stuff that was happening. Like one day, one kid was talking about getting stopped by the police for eating cold pizza while he was on his way to school that morning. The cop said, `No one eats cold pizza in the morning,’ and the kid had said, `I do.’ It turned out some other kid had thrown a brick at a car.”
So Fischer decided to turn on the tape recorder and have her students talk while they were taking portraits. It could either be a self-portait-they would get everything set up and then someone else would click the shutter-or they could take a portrait of a classmate.
While setting up and then sitting in front of the camera, the student would talk. Free flow. After developing and printing the pictures into 9-by-11 portraits, the students would transcribe and edit the tape, and attach the words to the picture.
They called their project “Not 90210.” This was no Beverly Hills High School scenario.
“This isn’t a lot of blond girls with mini-skirts driving Jeep Cherokees,” Fischer said. “They watch that (TV) program, but that’s not their life.”
Instead, the students talked about everything from pregnancy to getting their ears pierced, from gangs to prejudice.
“Some are funny and lighthearted, and some are heartbreaking,” Fischer said. “They’re life affirming.”
Lines of communication
Mary Ann Lea, a book designer and coordinator of multicultural exhibits for ScottForesman Publishing Co. in Glenview, has chosen 30 of the portraits to hang in the corporate lobby starting in mid-October.
“When you see results like this, it means that something really good was happening in that classroom. The students learned to combine the primary tools of communication. They are communicating with knowledge and honesty of self and creating powerful images,” Lea said.
Since Fischer started teaching at Morton East 21 years ago, the school’s population has changed radically, from predominantly Eastern European to about 90 percent Hispanic.
“And Hispanic students, for whatever reason, really seem to pick up on the mystical qualities of photography,” Fischer said.
“They have a sense of drama that seems to be innate. I tell them: `When you’re a painter, you start with a blank canvas and you add on. A photographer does the opposite, a photographer isolates. You start with all sorts of things, and get closer and closer, eliminating things.’
“These kids know what to isolate. They have such an elegance of placement, and they end up with strong composition.”
`A life of its own’
Renamed “Cross Sections and Dialogues,” the project is now entering its fourth year, with 65 portraits in the portfolio. Fischer has held candy sales and dipped into her own pocket to finance such expenses as chemicals and paper.
“We have a budget for our (photography) supplies, but because this project is optional, I’ve never felt that we should use money from our basic fund for it,” she said.
“It’s a project that has just taken on a life of its own. I know that if you saw some of these kids somewhere, wearing black, some of them with hairnets on, you (would) make one kind of a judgment. But when you talk to them, when you listen, you make another judgment. They’re not frightening people.
“When they come out of the developing room with these pictures, well, they love having them. They’re very self-aware. And these results are astonishing.”
Besides hanging on the walls of the high school, the pictures have been exhibited at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Batavia, National Louis University’s campuses in Evanston and Wheaton, and the Ray College of Design in Chicago.
Starting Oct. 15, 30 of the portraits will be exhibited at ScottForesman, 1900 E. Lake Ave. in Glenview. Call Lea at 708-486-2641 for more information.
