Acting as decisively and efficiently as a pro, Jonathan Gines dived into the teeming game room at the Calderon Boys and Girls Club, directed two friends to the drinking fountain and had one hold the button while the other caught the stream in his cupped hand.
Jonathan, 11, came in close with his camera and framed the picture to include only what mattered and exclude everything else. The result would be a model study of form and texture, the organic curves of the boy’s palm serving as foil to the transparent arc of water.
Jonathan clearly has an eye, and an ambition to follow in the path of his older sister, who is studying photography at the University of Texas at Austin.
But he may owe some of his skill to the teaching of artist Dianne Monroe at Calderon’s photography club, which is organized by a program called Healing Arts.
Touted as the first program of its kind in the United States, Healing Artsis motivated by research showing that involvement in art programs tends to keep children interested in school and improves their test scores.
Especially for kids who may be at risk because of abuse or neglect, art can provide a voice they might not otherwise have — a way to express feelings, develop abilities and grow a positive sense of self.
Although Healing Arts targets at-risk children, some of the kids do not fall into that category. Its programs at the Calderon Boys and Girls Club, for example, are open to any of the youth center’s members.
Despite its name and its target, Healing Arts does not use art as therapy. It teaches art as art. The healing part is indirect, but not necessarily invisible.
At Calderon, Monroe leads a general arts session and one for girls only, in addition to the photography club.
Each group meets once a week for about 50 minutes, leaving little time for teaching and hands-on activity. But somehow Monroe is able to inculcate her charges with the basics.
After a couple of sessions of orientation and theory, it’s time for the photography club to do some shooting.
First, Monroe reviews the previous lessons.
“What’s the No. 1 photography rule?” she asks the group, which on this day includes 10 girls and two boys, ages 9 to 12.
“Frame and compose,” one answers.
“That’s the No. 2 rule,” Monroe says. She gently reminds them that the No. 1 rule is “Get close.”
She spends a few minutes reviewing aesthetic concepts, demonstrating each with color snapshots.
“Which ones have interesting lines, patterns, shadows?”
The preliminaries occupy nearly half the allotted time. At last, the group files outside to the back of the youth center and starts snapping pictures, often of each other, in and near the playground.
After a few minutes, Monroe leads the group down to the concrete-lined creek channel a few dozen yards away.
They have only about 20 minutes outside before it’s time to return to the classroom . The following week, Monroe begins the session by passing out the photographs the kids had shot the week before.
In some of them, she says, “There were fingers and extra legs and arms and camera cords. Take a lot of time with your pictures so we don’t have arms and thumbs — frame and compose.”
But several of the photographs are surprisingly deft examples of the art — a perfectly framed image of a girl hanging from playground equipment, another of a girl at the water’s edge, a cool abstract of the painted lines on a sports court, with a soda can in the foreground.
A boy wants to spend more time going over the photos, but the group needs to go outside to shoot new ones.
