SHAKER HEIGHTS -- A partnership between Hathaway Brown and Newbridge Cleveland Center for Arts and Technology has spurred a photography project between their students.
Over a year ago, the school held an education innovation symposium, a two- to three-day workshop for teachers around the country. Jamie Morse, chair of HB Upper School’s Visual Arts Department, said the whole idea was to share innovative techniques and processes for teaching. The keynote speaker was Bill Strickland, a man Morse said has a brilliant way of exposing children to arts and technology.
Karen Clark-Keys, director of youth programs at Newbridge, said Newbridge is a fourth replication site of the national centers for arts and technology created by Strickland. Strickland is also the founder of Manchester Bidwell, a corporation that helped to create the spin-off national centers.
When Morse went to hear Strickland speak at the symposium, he learned of Newbridge and how it works with children from all over the Greater Cleveland area, some of whom may not have access to the arts at their schools.
Clark-Keys explained Newbridge has programming for adult job readiness and training offered free to the student. It also provides youth after-school programming comprising courses in the center’s four studios, including ones for ceramics, digital art, music recording and production and a photography course.
“(HB) decided it might be cool to partner up with (Newbridge) because of the strong photography program we have here,” Morse said.
This is when Clark-Keys introduced Morse, who has been with HB for 28 years, including 13 as the dean of students, to photography teachers Donald Black and Robert Banks.
“It’s always beneficial for people from different parts of Greater Cleveland to come together with a common purpose and in this case, the common purpose is the love of photography,” said Stephanie Hiedeman, director of the center for civic engagement at HB. “I think there is always a benefit in learning from each other.”
Since Newbridge doesn’t have a traditional dark room like HB does, the two groups will come together to create a joint, two-week exhibition that will travel between HB and Newbridge.
“Both students will be doing the same thing,” Clark-Keys said. “Hathaway Brown students will come and work with our students and together they will go to a location in the city. The Hathaway Brown students will use standard, analog film cameras and Newbridge will use digital.”
She said the two sets of students will be paired up together on Jan. 20 and will alternate as teams taking photos of spaces and landscapes in and around Case Western Reserve University.
The HB students will then process the negatives and the Newbridge students will re-join them on Jan. 27 to participate in traditional print processing. Then in April, the students will have a joint exhibit of their work.
“I’m hoping that the students have a better understanding of the diversity of the region because they are working with students who go to different types of schools than the students here,” Hiedeman said. “I’m hoping they learn to look at photography in a different light and learn that when people collaborate they can sometimes create something better than on their own.”
Clark-Keys said even today, some professional photographers still use film and a good photographer needs to know about the history and various techniques that gives artists a greater palette to manipulate images and do different things.
“We’re hoping this gives the students a broader understanding of the photographic process and a new way of looking at their environment,” she said. “Most of us don’t look deeply at the space around us and this is an opportunity for them to work with a new set of eyes and a new way of thinking and that will automatically help them to see things differently. They will be able to look at things in terms of telling a story instead of just taking a picture.”
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