In a slightly cramped conference room at Commonwealth Community Care, one of dozens of medical facilities in a single Springfield, Mass., neighborhood, photographer Courtney Bent meets up with a very mixed group. Men and women. Some are teenagers, a couple are well over 60. A few are here with family members; in some cases, their health aids. And the first thing they do, together, is watch a slide show of photos taken by mostly unknown photographers.
Bent describes one photo that she loves. It’s by a woman named Mary Joe. Hands are moving in from the sides of the picture. The next photo appears to be of a wall, taken by a man named E.J.
“He took pictures with his tongue!” Bent tells the group. [I put a ] little switch by his chin. And you know, he was just photographing the wall! What is he doing? I thought.” But when the photo was developed, Bent saw “a beautiful little heart in the middle.” And she says, forgiving herself for her earlier quick judgment, it just goes to show you, “everyone has their own perspective.”
Everyone is here for a two day, weekend long workshop in digital photography. And each person has some kind of physical or developmental challenge that would usually make taking photos not necessarily impossible, but challenging at best, and certainly not a priority in their lives. Several are on the autism spectrum, one has Alzheimer’s, another has cerebral palsy, and several are paralyzed from an accident, or since birth. After the weekend, each one of them will have learned how to use a camera, they’ll take it home, and Bent says she hopes they keep shooting.
When Bent meets her new students, she knows only one thing: They’ve never used a camera before. They may have taken photos with their smart phones, but that’s about it, and without knowing them for more than just a few minutes, she then asks some rather personal questions, about mobility and movement.
“Can they lift their elbows away from their waist? Squeeze their knees? Are they in a wheelchair? How do they drive it?” She says begins to visualize what might be the best adaptation and what their abilities are.
She adds, “I like to say ‘ abilities.”
Bent is a former fashion photographer who with her husband produced the 2009 documentary “Shooting Beauty” chronicling the start up of Bent’s then experimental photography workshop program at United Cerebral Palsy in Watertown, MA. It was the inspiration for these photography workshops and the 100 Cameras Project. And on this morning, while Nicole Jeronimo waits patiently in her wheelchair, Bent walks around her in circles and offers up some ideas about where to place a camera.
” What I’m probably going to do, you tell me if this works for you, is to mount a camera like a tripod here,” says Bent, poinion the tray in front of Jeronimo.
“That’s perfect,” Jeronimo said. Who says her left side is the best. She will lift her elbow
Jeronimo lives in Ludlow, Mass. She graduated last year from high school and now is taking a class at Westfied State. She was born prematurely and has almost no function from the waist down. Her hands are limp. But she does have the ability to lift her elbow. That’s how she operates her wheelchair and now, she’ll use that elbow to hit the shutter release on her camera, which is securely attached to the tripod with Velcro, key to almost everyone’s set up.
Another factor in all this is the size and sensitivity of camera shutter releases. Bent says some of the people she meets can press a switch only with their head or inside of their leg. She uses what she calls Jelly Bean switches, which have much bigger area to press.
About half of this workshop’s participants don’t, in fact, hold their cameras with their hands. The youngest person here is a teenager. The oldest is over 60. And one by one, they head outside in search of scenery, and a certain freedom. They come back in for lunch and to take pictures of each other and hear more from Bent on photo composition, landscape. and portraiture.
Springfield is the first stop for Bent in a series of ten photography workshops, ten students at a time. (Do the math, and it adds up to the 100 Cameras Project. ) Including Veronica Perez, who wants to be a social worker and is now taking classes at Holyoke Community College. She has slightly mobility in hands, and is otherwise paralyzed from an injury from the neck down. It is remarkable how casually describes what happened.
“When I was 11 months old, I got shot by my dad. And He also killed my mother. So I know how it feels to be an individual who is alone. And I just see the world in a whole different light. This project can do [something ] for other people. … I feel like I could bring something to other people.”
Most of the people here, including Perez, are patients of Dr. Pixie Plummer. She says what she sees on this day is not at all about disability.
“It’s this powerful example of how independent they are.”
She says watching them make choices about when they activate their cameras and what to take pictures of is inspiring. She says if these men and women have the ability to push buttons for photos, there’s no reason they can’t use similar technology to do other things. It’s impossible, she says, not to fantasize about what else they can do, from learning to feed themselves with a mechanical spoon to thinking about what they could do with the rest of their lives.
The day is filled with shooting, conversations, lectures from Bent to ignore the zoom button and look how light falls on everything, and pizza for lunch. Courtney Bent ‘s next stop with her 100 Cameras Project is Oakland, California.
Photos from the 100 Cameras workshop in Springfield will be on display at the Springfield JCC in February 2015; a special exhibition event will take place on February 26 in conjunction with ReelAbilities screening of short films.