Artist’s Statement: Working with Escuela-Vieau

Having the opportunity to work with the staff and students at the Vieau school through the Boy’s & Girl’s Club has been an infinitely rewarding experience for me. Being able to capture some footage of the facility and its staff will always serve as good memento for the events that have transpired over the past several weeks. Also, learning how to use photography to portray real-life scenarios proved to be more challenging than expected, especially not being able to photograph students due to legal restrictions.

Armed with a Sony DSC-N2 Cybershot camera and an iPhone for audio recording, I took photographs and collected sound bytes over the course of two weeks for this project. It was tricky, but I managed to keep the students out of any of the shots that I took. In all, I collected about twenty images at the site and took them home for editing and review. Sound bytes were obtained using the “voice recorder” feature of my iPhone in two single hour-and-a-half recordings.

After downloading the bytes into iTunes, I listened to the files and decided which parts were both usable and relevant to my presentation photos. Cutting the usable portions of the audio track into smaller sound bytes proved to be quite challenging, as I don’t have any sort of professional audio editing software. Ultimately, I ran the headphone line in to the microphone line on the computer and recorded using GarageBand while simultaneously playing the part of the clip in iTunes. It worked.

Next, after having selected the images to be used, I tried to construct a way to organize them. I settled on starting with the photos taken outside and then moving inside the building, and finally into the classroom (although the photos were not captured in this order). This worked well for the presentation because outside the school is a fenced-in play area and one of the two usable sound clips that I had was of children playing.

My intention was also to convey my personal experience volunteering at Escuela Vieau school; at first feeling like an outsider, and later becoming more comfortable with my surroundings. School staff and students have been a pleasure to work with and have always been friendly to me, making me feel welcomed. I included some text in the presentation that would explain some real-life experiences and observations at the school and correlate with the audio, too.

From this experience, I have taken away two major lessons thus far. First, capturing real-time events on camera is hard, especially in trying to present a bigger picture. Second, is that in general people are nice, even if they are unfamiliar and you’re willing to lend a hand.