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By Sam Watson
Johnson City Press Education Writer
swatson@johnsoncitypress.com
MILLIGAN COLLEGE — Though Milligan College senior Chad Parker could offer 11-year-old Dakota Calhoun technical advice about photography during a visit to campus Tuesday, the boy already had artistic instincts in place that no one could teach.
“I think what’s important is seeing what he finds important and what interests him to photograph,” Parker said. “It taught me that there are many great minds who are just starting out, but are just looking for advice. Sometimes, it’s just advice on how to get light to hit the right way.
“He helped me to always remember that a picture is just going to be flat without emotion,” he said. “If it doesn’t have emotional content, it’s not going to be a very well developed image.
“It has to show some of your personality or your emotions in it, and it does with most of Dakota’s work,” Parker said.
Calhoun and 12 of his peers at Kingsport’s Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School have been learning photography since November, taking pictures in various locales and printing them in a school darkroom. Teacher Hollie Barnett, a 2000 Milligan graduate, works with students in kindergarten through fifth grade in a weekly after-school program with help from a sixth-grade volunteer who also enjoys some darkroom time.
The students visited Barnett’s alma mater Tuesday during Milligan’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Service Day for tips from college students in Alice Anthony’s photography classes. The Roosevelt students also got a chance to see their work on display in the college’s McMahan Student Center gallery.
“I wanted them to see a real darkroom, because ours is a makeshift bathroom darkroom, and see other students working,” Barnett said. “We want these kids to see careers in the future that come from photography and encourage them to go to college, and Milligan is a great place to start.”
Since taking up photography in the after-school program, Roosevelt fifth-grader Molly Blankenbeckler, 10, has focused her lens on a career.
“I did it for the fun of it, and now I want a job like that,” she said, adding that Tuesday’s trip inspired her to set her sights on Milligan for college.
Blankenbeckler’s photographs in the Milligan gallery concentrated on the minute details of everyday items, such as strings of a dirty mop and the upper half of a Mr. Potato Head toy.
“I like to take abstract pictures,” she said. “I wanted to focus in on just the eyes and the nose and the hat, because I didn’t like the rest of it. It’s more interesting because you don’t have all of it. You focus in on something simple.”
Although Barnett’s students sometimes revert to “point-and-shoot” mode, many of them already have developed an eye for the art of photography. Calhoun, for example, has garnered a few financial offers for his prints from Roosevelt faculty members.
“It’s fun just to take pictures,” Calhoun said. “It’s fun looking at the stuff and then thinking about things you can do with them.”
With a little help from Barnett, Calhoun photographed reeds and water plants in the Bays Mountain reservoir, resulting in an eye-catching black-and-white landscape that landed on the wall at Milligan with several of his other prints.
“Dakota’s a wonderful student,” Parker said. “He learns really quickly. We were talking about different kinds of cameras, like single lens reflex, twin lens and medium and large format cameras, and he was real talkative about that and remembered everything.
“We were talking about printing in the darkroom, and he already knew a lot of the background information a lot of students don’t have, which is amazing considering this is his first year that he’s actually had a class.”
Parker was equally impressed by Calhoun’s composition in a photograph of a bare tree adjacent to an old building.
“He tilted it slightly just to make it more eerie,” Parker said. “It gave it more of an emotion than just a flat image. One of his strengths is that he has focus down really well.”
Anthony, who passed on her love for photography to Barnett, was pleased to see her former pupil doing the same with the Roosevelt students. With Tuesday’s service program, Anthony’s Milligan students got in on the act.
“They’re helping others, but in return, they’re the ones getting blessed,” Anthony said. They get a real reward in it.”
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