My history with crafts is spotty at best. Elementary school art class is a memory mine field for me; mostly I recall coming home with eerily mushed clay bowls, woven paper placemats, and an inability to draw. But for the past six weeks I’ve been spending an hour each Thursday with a third grade boy. I’m a volunteer with a organization called Art Buddies, and we’ve been working on making my third grade friend a costume. Turns out, thirty years later, I don’t mind art class as much as I remember.

Art Buddies Spring 2009 – Images by Chris Bohnhoff

The basic Art Buddies structure is that people from the creative industry sign up and get paired with a third, fourth, or fifth grader at Whittier International Elementary in South Minneapolis. Over the course of six weeks you and your buddy have an assignment to work on – ours was putting together a costume depicting the child as ‘ruler of the world.’ But the emphasis is on hanging out and just being with your buddy, not so much on the end product (although there is a parade during the last meeting and a chance to show off a little bit).

I don’t have kids of my own, and my friends’ kids that I spend time with are generally in the 1-4 year old range, so this has really been my first one-on-one experience with a 9-year-old. And as week one started, and kids and adult buddies were getting paired up, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. My buddy is a back of the line, messing around with the other back of the line boys kind of boy, so I had to wait through almost everyone before he made his way over to my table. And there was very little sign of interest as I introduced myself and our assignment, as the Art Buddies organizers guided us to do. We had been encouraged to bring some kind of tools or examples of the work we do in our creative careers, and I had brought my portfolio, and my tripod, and my camera. I asked if my buddy if he wanted to check those things out. Not really. But he was excited to check out the art supplies.

Art Buddies may kid its volunteers in to thinking that they are a big draw for these kids, but on that first Thursday afternoon I saw the truth: the real draw was free reign over a double-sized classroom chock full of bins and bins of art supplies. Fabric, yarn, all manor of little shiny things, hot glue guns, cardboard. . . the possibilities were staggering. And my buddy (with me trailing behind) spent most of that first hour digging through bins and coming back to our table with armfuls of stuff. He had no idea what his costume was going to be, and he didn’t especially want to talk about it, or about any of the other suggested topics, like what makes a good leader. But processing all the textures, colors, and possibilities was exactly what he wanted to do. So that’s what we did.

I learned a few things over the next five weeks with my buddy.

• Not all 9 year old boys are driven to make everything they touch in to some kind of weapon.
• Man, do the kids love them some hot glue guns.
• I can’t tell you the name of the movie or of the actor, but apparently I look like the bad guy killer in some movie that my buddy watched. . . all I can tell you is that it was in some apartment, and the character he said I looked like got mad and killed the landlord, then I killed my girlfriend, but I didn’t really love her, but then the girl that I really loved ended up killing me. Or something like that.
• I like 9 year olds. Even when all signs point to complete zoning out or messing around, they’re processing and figuring stuff out. It’s fun to watch that process and be amazed by what they can do.

As the weeks progressed, It did end up seeming like my  buddy liked hanging out with me. The evidence? We made each other cards after the parade on week six, and his said, “Thanks for being the best art buddy ever.”

Fun additional note: a reporter from the Star Tribune filed this story from our Art Buddies class – my buddy and I are even quoted (even though they spelled my name wrong)!

Exactly two years ago I traveled to rural Sierra Leone with a nonprofit group called the Sierra Leone Plymouth Partnership (SLPP). As a documentary and portrait photographer, my goal on the trip was to visually represent the group’s work providing relief to the residents of three small villages that, like most of Sierra Leone, had been almost entirely decimated by the country’s civil war in the 1990s. It was a life-changing trip, and one that I still feel fortunate to have made.

Each year a group of SLPP volunteers return to the villages to meet with residents and work together to improve their quality of life. This year’s trip is a little different: cell phone towers have gone up very close to the villages, making live blog posts possible. I’d encourage anyone to check out the SLPP blog, in particular this week while they’re in the villages, for an unfiltered sense of what it’s like to visit one of the poorest nations in the world: a complicated, but entirely enriching, experience for us members of the ‘first world.’

If you’re interested in seeing my take on Sierra Leone, please visit my Sierra Leone gallery. Also, I have a traveling exhibition of portraits from the trip entitled Made Real: Portraits from Sierra Leone that can be viewed and purchased online. All proceeds directly benefit the Sierra Leone Plymouth Partnership.

Last Sunday was one of a few types of Perfect Minnesota day: 70 degrees, sunny, leaves budding and daffodils out. (The other types: 50 degrees and peak fall colors, 20 degrees after a nice snowfall, pretty much any time on the patio at Sea Salt Restaurant.) Not only was it phenomenal outside, but a good friend of ours turned 70, and rented out the historic streetcar station at Como Park for a potluck. There was a roving accordion player, eleven apple pies (the birthday boy’s favorite), creamed herring, hotdishes, and just a great time. Plus one of those foam gliders.

Ahhhhhh Spring.

More at chrisbohnhoff.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Despite what my lack of postings the past couple weeks may suggest, I’ve been pretty busy, mostly with business-y things other than taking pictures. (Although I am doing some shooting for a story for the Carleton College Voice, among other little projects; just can’t post anything from the set until it’s published.)

Mostly I’ve been enmeshed in various marketing stuff. Moving my portfolio from agency to agency, sometimes talking to the art buyers, sometimes just leaving it to its own fate for a day or two on a conference table. Launching a Facebook ad campaign for my wedding business. Poking around Twitter. Doing a bunch of work in an effort to increase my Google page rank and tweak my site for better search engine optimization.

It’s all important stuff, and for all you small business types, you know how it is trying to drive business: completely emorphous, seemingly random, and demanding a skill set that is entirely separate from what drew you to go in to business in the first place.

So you end up becoming an expert (or at least picking up just enough knowledge to be dangerous) in all sorts of stuff that you never expected – or wanted – to know anything about. For me that’s my budding understanding of how Google ranks pages. I’m lucky to be part of an industry that does a great job of information sharing, through groups like the American Society of Media Photographers, and businesses like PhotoShelter, and the heart of the photo blog community that I’ve come to know (Chase Jarvis, Strobist, APhotoEditor to name my favorite few), all of whom have been hammering away for months on the ever-growing importance of good organic Google search results for your site. Here’s the high level view of what I’ve learned so far, and have been trying to implement wherever I can:

• Using the keywords that you want people to find you by in your page titles is important, and the order of your words makes a difference. For example, “Chris Bohnhoff Editorial Photographer in Minneapolis” isn’t as good as “Minneapolis Editorial Photographer Chris Bohnhoff”. A little counter intuitive, but that’s what they say.
• Packing keywords in to the meta:keywords and meta:description fields in the head section of your html code makes a small difference, but should still be done.
• Also including keywords in photo captions, file names, and alt text fields is key.

Then there are incoming links, which apparently is 60-70% of what makes up search ranking. That means getting yourself listed in reputable online directories, blogging, commenting on others’ blogs, tweeting, being active in as many online communities as possible. (I’ve almost convinced my wife that reading blogs counts as work, but she hasn’t completely bought in yet.)

I’ve only begun this process, and I’ve got a long way to go, but that’s the deal: continuous improvement. What’s interesting to me is how Google has codified the importance of interconnectedness in setting the importance of links so high. To be a success in Google’s world you have to convince people that you have content worth linking to. Sure, you can pay to include yourself in a fake community. Or you can put in the time to forge actual connections with people online. Weird.

Like I said, I’m early in the process, so leave a comment and correct me if I’m off base, or if you have anything to add on the topics of online marketing, the experience of being a wearer of many unexpected hats, whatever. And next time I’ll get back to the pictures. . .

One of the things I do in the name of paying the bills is photographing new real estate listings for an agency in town. They’re great to work with, and I enjoy the variety of the places they send me. Most of the time, given the requirements of the average home shopper, the houses have been ’staged’ for showing prior to my arrival; furniture and furnishings have been supplemented, everything is perfectly clean. . . the house has been sterilized and packaged up so that prospective buyers can imagine themselves in the space.

Not so with the house I shot yesterday.

It was a sprawling rambler out in the woods in a remote outer ring suburb – a house where you walk in and you smell the smell of grandparents. Just last year I helped my Grandmother out of the house she’d lived in for over 50 years, and her house had smelled comforting in almost exactly the same way.

Even though most of the previous residents’ stuff had been moved out, there were still things lingering that fit together in a way that gave me this sense that I knew them: the 19th Century-era German Bible, the knotty pine, the piano in the corner, this well-worn armchair in the window looking out over the back yard. Such a personal thing photographing a person’s house. So rich in the sense of presence is a house that a family has lived in for decades.

I’ve been photographing real estate listings for the past year, and I’ve never lingered over the act before, but in this house I sat down in the armchair’s dented seat for a minute. I imagined what it would have felt like for the owner to sit in that spot before moving on or out, after what I imagined to have been a long stay. I congratulated him on a job well done and wished him well, then moved on to the next room.

More work at chrisbohnhoff.com.