August 23, 2007 | Read Time: 3 minutes
During the past two years, young people in New Orleans have been documenting life in their storm-ravaged city — and
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sharing what they’ve seen with others — through a grass-roots effort called the New Orleans Kid Camera Project.
Combining instruction in photography, creative writing, and electronic media, the project helps children learn new ways to express themselves and to talk and write about how they feel about the changes in their lives since Hurricane Katrina struck the Cresent City.
“It seemed like a natural entrance into their emotional world,” says Joanna K. Rosenthal, one of the project’s co-founders.
The project got its start a few months after the storm, when Ms. Rosenthal and her fellow co-founder, Cat Malovic, were finishing graduate degrees at the Tulane School of Social Work and doing an internship at a distribution center in the Ninth Ward.
Across the street from the center there was a family with four kids.
“They were the first family back in the neighborhood,” says Ms. Rosenthal. “The kids really had nothing to do, so we started giving them disposable cameras.”
Ms. Rosenthal and Ms. Malovic would have the children’s photographs developed, and then sit with them on the front porch and talk about the pictures.
Since then, the all-volunteer group has taken the project to 10 neighborhoods and worked with about 70 children.
One little girl in St. Bernard Parish, just outside New Orleans, took almost an entire of roll of pictures of her family’s gutted house.
She called one of the images “Inside Out,” says Ms. Rosenthal, because everything that had been inside the house, all of her belongings, everything that had been in her room, was now outdoors.
“Images like that just really strike you, and make you realize what these kids have actually experienced and seen, things that no kid should ever have to see,” she says. “And then in other images, the kids capture real hope.”
Seeking Charity Status
Contributions from individuals and grants from the Gulf Coast Ecological Health & Community Renewal Fund, the Contemporary Arts Center (in New Orleans), and the Tulane University School of Social Work paid for cameras, film processing, framing supplies, and field trips.
The founders hope to make the program permanent, and have applied for tax-exempt status.
The young people’s work has been exhibited in coffee shops and at local festivals and conferences — and even the New Orleans Museum of Art.
When the children see other people looking at their photographs, “it really makes them realize that their efforts, their work, and their creativity have value,” says Ms. Rosenthal. “They’re seeing that in a way that they’ve never experienced before.”
