When I first came up with the idea to have the kids focus on an object, my thought was they would make photographs of just one object. For example, maybe just one car, because a car is large enough where you could see it from different angles. However, this proved to be too constricting. The kids kept coming back with photos of anything they thought to be interesting, and most of them fell away from the idea of the project unless I walked around with them. Maybe I expected too much from kids who never had much time to make photographs. The original idea came from a similar assignment which was given to me by my college professor, Marcia Treiger Goldner, who told us to pick one room in our house and only photograph things in that room. I picked the bathroom, and it was small, which I liked and picked intentionally because I thought small would be a challenge. But I was at Antonelli Institute, where we only focused on photography. The kids here are having a great time but they are only in classes occasionally, and this is their first real experience with making photographs.

So the fact that the kids were coming back with photos of things that weren’t necessarily on topic was fine. But some kids decided to put their own spin on the project, which helped me to see things differently. Ha, go figure.

I told Henry the project and gave him some examples of the project (like cars, or large things). And he came back with tons of water photos. I thought it was great. He got really creative too. He had all kinds of water splashes, streams and sprays. With Henry’s photo of water splashing on to the hand holding a can, he brought home the best photo of the day.