Retired bus driver looks to restart photography project

 Program gave disposable cameras to fourth-graders

By Chuck Carlson
Battle Creek Enquirer

BATTLE CREEK, Mich. (AP) — They still have a childlike view of life with an unjaundiced eye toward a grownup world that isn’t too far away.

Maybe that’s why Julie Dellinger thought her photo project, Through the Eyes of a Child, would work best with fourth-grade students.

“They’re the ones who don’t have the inhibitions you have when you get older,” she told the Battle Creek Enquirer.

So it was two years ago when Dellinger, with financial support from the Battle Creek Optimist Club, launched a program to give disposable cameras to 68 Sonoma Elementary School fourth-graders and have them take a week to shoot what they saw — from family members to the pet dog to their favorite toy.

It was an eye-opener in more ways than one.

The film was developed and the best of the photos were selected by a committee and they were displayed in an art show that left many in attendance amazed, impressed and, in some cases, in tears.

“I remember parents were walking around in awe at what these kids had done,” Dellinger said. “I couldn’t believe what I’d seen and it was all done with these little disposable cameras. One mom was walking around with tears running down her cheek. I thought something was wrong but she said she just couldn’t believe what the kids had done.”

It was a project that seemed like it had a future in the Harper Creek schools and it was a project close to Dellinger’s heart, who had retired in 2007 after 30 years as a bus driver in the school system

After all, it combined her love of the students with her new passion, photography.

“After I retired, I decided I wasn’t going to sit around,” she said.

So she enrolled in photography classes at Kellogg Community College and she’s been taking classes ever since.

“I’ve taken every photography class there two or three times,” said Dellinger, who also takes the school’s 20- by 30-foot “Welcome to Sonoma” picture every fall. “It was just something that interested me.”

It was 2012 when she approached the Optimist Club to help support the project financially. After that first year, the cost of developing film for more than 60 cameras, as well as enlarging the photos and mounting them, became too much.

Through the Eyes of the Child died quietly last year and Dellinger figured it was over.

Until it wasn’t.

Last month, Dellinger was visiting Dr. Jeremy Myers, a Battle Creek chiropractor and Optimist Club member, when he casually asked what had happened to the project. Dellinger explained and Myers suggested she make another presentation to the Optimists.

On May 1, she made her pitch, understanding that disposable cameras were probably no longer an option. Instead, she suggested donations of small “point and shoot” digital cameras. The Optimists will likely have an answer for her by later this summer.

“It just kind of snowballed,” Dellinger said.

If it does come together, Dellinger, who is also working with Sonoma Principal Cyndi Mead and Wendy Van Geison, Harper Creek’s director of curriculum, hopes to expand the project to Harper Creek’s other two elementary schools — Wattles Park and Beadle Lake.

She said even a donation of 30 digital cameras would allow her to hand them out to one school at a time starting in the fall. That would allow for another art show next spring.

Dellinger said in its one year, the project provided kids with a common goal and a chance to express themselves in ways they’d never thought about.

“What I like most is that kids who aren’t necessarily successful in school are successful in this,” she said. “It intertwines with schoolwork. And some of their photos are just awesome.”