When I arrive at a location shoot and I’m greeted with cookies and coffee, I can pretty much guarantee it’s gonna be a good day. Same story with donuts, come to think of it…

I arrived at the home of Pat and David Barker last week for the Plymouth Church Neighborhood Foundation and immediately felt like family. We talked (over cookies) for a good 20 minutes before the topic of our shoot even came up, swapping stories of the babies in our lives (their two week old great granddaughter, my seven month old son), and about their passion for helping homeless youth, which grew out of Pat’s tenure as a high school science teacher, when she discovered how prevalent teenage homelessness is.

I saw this picture as I was packing up after the bulk of our shoot, and had to unpack and take another minute to capture it. I’m so glad I did.

The work I do with nonprofits is so important to my professional life. Not only do I get to meet people who do amazing, selfless work, and help tell compelling stories that the public desperately needs to hear, but also I invariably leave nonprofit projects reinvigorated, both in terms of my photography and my faith in the basic goodness of humanity. I’m in the very lucky position of meeting amazing people like the Barkers on a regular basis. It’s the number one reason I’m a photographer.

Earlier this year I had the chance to help Plymouth Church Neighborhood Foundation tell a couple success stories from their past year for their 2011 Annual Report. PCNF does incredible work providing housing to a wide range of at-risk populations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and it was an incredibly rewarding experience spending time with some of their clients, as well as those who serve the underserved.

Plymouth Church Neighborhood Foundation 2011 Annual Report – Images by Chris Bohnhoff

Story one was a new mixed use building housing 40 or so young people transitioning out of either foster care or homeless situations. I really had no idea what to expect, but what I found were people at ease and empowered, taking control of their lives after coming out of difficult circumstances. On-site job coaches talked of dedicated kids, and the residents who let me in to their rooms obviously took great care of their spaces.

Story two was a building that PCNF took over last year and completely renovated, serving low income adults. I spent the morning with one resident who had just moved in to a unit a couple months earlier, after a number of years with no permanent address. He still had plenty to work out when we talked, but imagine the stress lifting from your shoulders, knowing that you have a safe place to stay.

At the adult residence I also got to spend some time with the building manager, a woman with a history in law enforcement, who is the resident fixer-of-all-problems in her current role. So fun to talk to people who love their jobs: as we toured the building and she pointed out all the improvements that had been made, person after person stopped us to get her help on transportation issues, government agency red tape questions, building things. . . all kinds of stuff. It seemed like an exhausting position. But she told us, ‘I love my job. I can’t walk down the hall without meeting someone I can help. How many people can say that?’

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.

I don’t have any kids of my own. My best friends have two young daughters who I see all the time, I’ve spent plenty of time around other peoples’ kids, and I consider myself a fan of the kid. And moreover, I feel like kids generally like me too, because I have absolutely no problem regressing mentally and emotionally to the level of a five year old. It’s pretty therapeutic, actually.

Having none of my own, however, puts me at a disadvantage from time to time.

I’ve started doing some work with the Plymouth Neighborhood Foundation, a great group that works on a number of fronts within the broad category of creating low income housing opportunities. Last week I visited two of the properties they manage to take a couple portraits, one of which was a family portrait: a Somali woman, her 18 month old son, and her 5 month old daughter.

Hawa and her kids

Rapport with my subject is absolutely the most important thing in my portrait work. If there’s no trust or element of connection between me and the people I’m shooting, the photos end up bland and uninspired, no matter how interesting the composition or how intricate the lighting. But also, that connection is why I’m a photographer. How many jobs are there where you can just enter the home of complete strangers and get a glimpse of their life? This kind of shoot is exactly why I love my job.

But back to rapport. When there are kids in a shoot, they are the wellspring of all rapport: if you get them on your side, the adults will be with you. If you lose them, the adults will be spending all their energy getting the kids in the game and none of their energy making some kind of connection with the camera. So we walk in to the apartment, and the son, Aris, has this look like, Who are you and why are you in my house? So I get to work. I make eye contact, get the smiles going. As I start opening my light cases and camera bag I make faces to him that say, Ooh, what’s this great stuff? You wanna look? And that’s when the control slips from my hands, about 48 seconds in to the shoot.

Turns out that Aris is at the exact age where everything he does is a search for the edges – is standing on the couch going to get him yelled at? How about pulling his sister’s hair? (Not that these things happened; they’re just examples.) If you’ve ever been around toddlers you know the button pushing I’m talking about. So as soon as I open my light case, I’ve way oversold how interested Aris needs to be about what’s going on; he’s very quickly all over everything, pulling out cords, trying to actually *jump* on my camera bag, wanting to open everything.

As I’m putting these very breakable and expensive electronic lights up on light stands around the room, I realize the scope of the tactical error I’ve made. Aris is totally sold on how fun this stuff is, and what would be really fun would be to yank it all down and see what happens when it hits the floor. So he’s toddling from light to light, making like he’s preparing to pull. Luckily, part of what he’s doing is testing Hawa, so as he does these things he looks over at her and at me as owner of these great toys, to gauge our reactions. We have time to lunge over and stop him before he does any damage.

Meanwhile, between lungings, I’m metering the light, composing the shot, trying to get a word with Hawa. It’s kind of lunacy, but the shot comes together and it’s time to get the family sitting on the couch together. So Hawa drags Aris away from the lights and onto the couch and I get a couple shots before Aris squirms away. I play goalie and protect the gear. Hawa re-apprehends Aris. We get a couple more shots.

And so on.

Luckily, Hawa’s daughter was just stoic. I can’t remember her name, which is fairly fitting: you always remember the troublemaker more than the good kid (spoken by a classic good first child). I was able to get 15 or so shots before our demands to stay on the couch transformed Aris’ fun into definitely not fun, rendering him pretty much unphotogenic for the purposes of a photo shoot meant to show happy apartment residents. We called it a wrap, and I have never packed gear so quickly.

More work at chrisbohnhoff.com.