#tim barrus and stanford

[timbarrus]

Stuff That Went Out To Stanford University

I live in Appalachia. My last job (SPED) was working with adolescent boys w/ HIV/AIDS. The disease did not go away. It did not disappear. It's hard to take your meds when you live in a homeless shelter. It's humiliating when the school nurse has to dish out the antiretrovirals and everyone knows what you have. All of them are disabled. We focused a lot on art, and photography. Because it's what I know. Check out Flaunt sometime. Real Stories Gallery Foundation gifted cameras to us so we could go out and call ourselves photographers. We did not call ourselves survivors. So yesterday. It was a Gamechanger. Learning how to edit video gives you experience with math. Hands on. All of this times ten.

Real Stories is the only nonprofit that understood the immediacy. Or you lose your students. Lie to them once, and you are done. The MOMENT the boys received the cameras, they were all over the place experimenting with the medium. None of them had ever owned a camera. We gave them the cameras, and they still have them. They did not have to wait, and wait, and wait for the cameras because the foundation was sensitive to the Time Problem. How many 14-year-old boys do you know who could wait months for a foundation (forget education, it's irrelevant) to follow its procedures, and these kids will wash their hands of you day 1. The foundation puts its money where its mouth is. Very rare. You guys employ a bigger picture, and that is fine. But it's a picture so removed from real kids, there's no there there. Not to the kid. They do not care intellectually about common challenges because they are challenges themselves.

I have failed them. You have failed them. Education has failed them. Afforable housing is now an abstraction. I wish there was some way to connect your bigger picture with their bigger picture. They are not the little people with the little answers. They are important people who have failed everything in their lives. The bigger picture is ephemeral because it is such a political animal. You have made that clear. I am here to tell you that smaller foundations have the ability to actually address the actual problems working with these kids, and working with them is easier than a foundation that is only there in the trenches with you, on a foundation's terms. A fantasy. Sorry, guys, but the boys have their own terms.

The gap between who you are and who they are is just one thing that doesn't work. This gap is about class and caste, and you know it. You are good guys, but you are imagining a world that no longer exists. I tell my students: College is not necessary. The people with the real money buying art photography, do not care where you went to college. What do you have in your portfolio today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Right now. Immediacy is maddening. But it's a big part of building trust. I could care less about where some photographer went to school. I am telling them they don't have to go to school to learn what they now know. What they know can be built upon by them. THEM. Not me. Guess what. They're publishing. They don't really need you guys. They can stake out their own own direction. A road trip they will not forget.