The photograph at a recent art display shows a slice of Baltimore life: a weather-worn elderly man standing in front of a shop on Hampden Avenue, his long straggly beard limply hanging from his chin, his eyes half-shut beneath the brim of his baseball cap.
It's a picture taken by a photographer with enough of an artistic eye that his work sells for $60 a shot. Not a bad price, considering that he is only 14 years old.
Jason Ferrell of Hampden is just one of Baltimore's new contingent of young photographers, who, with a 35-mm camera and a fresh way of seeing life, make their neighborhoods into works of art.
Jason and the others are taking the pictures as part of an after-school photo program called Youthlight, which has transformed eight children from Hampden and nine from Poppleton into fledgling photographers who can reap a profit from their works.
Many of the children could barely snap a photo before they joined Youthlight. Now, they're selling their work to an audience that includes free-lance photographers.
"Now I know that whatever I want to do I can do if I try," said Jason, who has sold $180 worth of photographs and has been a part of the program since it began.
The catalyst of the program is free-lance photographer Marshall Clarke, who created Youthlight three years ago as a way to impart his passion for photography to area children.
"I wanted to share my love of images," said Clarke, who is from Towson. "Children are getting less and less art in school. My love is photography, so I felt I could offer it to them."
With a grant from the Open Society Institute, he began two after-school groups based out of the House of Mercy of Poppleton and the Hampden Family Center to teach children how to take and develop photographs.
"We talk about what could make images better and what they really like in images," Clarke said.
Each group meets twice a week to develop photographs in a darkroom or go on field trips. When they aren't meeting, Clarke sends each pupil out with a 35-mm camera to scour the community for photographs. They wander their neighborhoods in packs, snapping photographs of boys jumping on mattresses or friends roller-skating down the street.
Among them is 10-year-old Markia Simpson of Poppleton, who recently took a picture of a car that had different colors on the doors and a driver with a grin of gold.
