The photographs in this book are the result of art enrichment classes that I taught to children in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1969 and 1970—at a settlement house, at inner-city public schools, and at a suburban private school. Students ages ten to fourteen were taught instant photography as a way to describe their lives, explore their neighborhoods, and express their feelings about the world. I was their teacher, a twenty-one-year-old senior at the Rhode Island School of Design, developing a graphic communication curriculum for children as my thesis project. My students focused their full attention on documenting their surroundings, friends, and families, and the result is an extraordinary album filled with the vivid, honest depictions that only personal photography can yield. The significance of these images is that they help us remember what the world looks and feels like from a child’s perspective, and how that experience can vary dramatically between neighborhoods. This book is a resource for art teachers, with detailed lesson plans and my approach to making meaningful images; for students of urban development and Black history; and for fans of instant print photography, which is gaining renewed popularity.

These art classes were the first of their kind to be supported by the Polaroid Corporation, which provided all the cameras and film and published several of my lessons along with my students’ images in the 1970s instructional guide Learn to See (now out of print), edited by Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas. The children’s work was also exhibited in galleries in Providence and Boston. I wanted visitors to take this work seriously as photographic art, rather than “just snapshots”, so I trimmed off the iconic white Polaroid borders and mounted the frameless images in grids on large black museum boards, along with some of the children’s handwritten notes, and labels identifying the photographers. This is similar to how their work is presented in the Gallery sections of the book. When the exhibit came down, the poster boards were packed away in a crate and stored in my darkroom, untouched for the next forty-five years.

I rediscovered the crate while preparing to move back to Providence. When I unscrewed the tightly-sealed cover and pulled out the decaying museum boards with the exhibit photos still attached, the pungent scent of the coating chemicals on the black-and-white film brought back a wave of nostalgia. I spent several hours appreciating the children’s work all over again with fresh eyes and realized what an important time capsule I had in my possession. I knew I had a responsibility to continue to preserve this work and to bring it to the attention of a wider audience.

Sample Page Spreads