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until the second or third grade a child’s predominant means of self-expression is drawing.

But when they’re just beginning to write, they often rely on their drawings rather than their writing to convey the meaning of the story.

the need to attend to our neglected physical and visual surroundings

and the need we all feel to articulate and communicate something relevant about our personal and communal lives.

thirty years of thinking about how we learn, and how we express ourselves with images.

when I demonstrated how the camera worked to the people I wanted to photograph, everyone, myself included, felt more at ease.

Their desire to be photographed was as strong as their desire to photograph.

The children’s pictures were more complicated and disturbing than mine — and, I began to realize, much closer to what it felt like to be there.

Merton’s photograph reflects that fear.

Their pictures and writings made for an uncompromising look at the problems they faced.

It’s unlikely that the young people would ever have written what they did without the pictures to prompt them (Kathy’s writing came from the beautiful landscape photographs she’d made), and the pictures would have been difficult to decipher without the stories to accompany them.

their photo-essays were a starting point for acknowledging and discussing, in their own voices, a very tough predicament. (

how photography and writing stimulated one another. Many of the students I worked with had trouble writing; they would labor painfully over a sentence or two. But when they worked from a photograph that had something to do with their own lives, especially a picture they had taken themselves, they were able to write more — and what they wrote about was their own experiences.

Asking them to write about the subject they were going to photograph, then asking them to make a list of images suggested by their writing — this was a way to help them organize their picture-taking before they went out to shoot.

These children had never seen each other’s neighborhoods, certainly not each other’s homes or families. They were essentially strangers to each other.

When the students brought back pictures of their families and communities, each child tried to explain what was going on in the pictures, and the others eagerly asked questions.

teachers rarely come from the same community as their students. Photographs can give them a glimpse into their students’ lives.

Photography is perhaps the most democratic visual art of our time. For most of us, picture taking is a part of our family lives. We don’t need a particular talent, like the hand-eye coordination necessary for drawing, to render what we look at. Even children and adults unfamiliar with photography can make photographs of what they see and imagine. For those of us who have used cameras, photography offers a language that can draw on the imagination in a way we may never have thought possible before.