Student art show explores definitions of beauty

Skyler Mortensen, 16, gives orders before a photo shoot — the studio must be set up just so.

Mirror goes there. Reflector here. Backdrop angled this way.

Before his model arrives, his classmate Casey Hohbein crouches in front of the mirror so Skyler can test the best angles for his shoot.

This has to be good. The final photograph, after all, will hang at Revolutionary Grounds Books and Coffee, 606 N. Fourth Ave., for the month of July.

Skyler and Casey are two of six students — three boys and three girls — who participated in Edge High School’s for-credit summer program, Portray-Elle.

For three 12-hour weeks, the students explored how media outlets depict women, learning about cultural definitions of beauty, the changing role of women and the sexualization of marketing, among other topics, says Brittany Battle, the Edge High School instructor and adviser who taught part of the class and encouraged students to consider factors influencing their own self-esteem.

It’s an engaging course for the tuition-free charter school that serves many at-risk students at its two campuses. In May, the Star reported that the Arizona Department of Education had investigated the school, finding answers on AIMS tests had been changed to boost scores.

For this course, the school partnered with multimedia production company Creatista to take students beyond the classroom to learn the basics of photography and editing. They also got some insight into the reality of the biz — sometimes digital primping happens.

“My hope is that by pulling the curtain back, it’s not necessarily that there won’t be glamor stuff out there, because some of that stuff is actually kind of fun, but that people will understand that there is a process to that glamor, and it doesn’t necessarily reflect reality all the time,” says Scott Griessel, who owns Creatista with his wife, Anna Harrison Griessel.

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One project presents the faces of a homeless woman and a business woman. Another asked individuals to hold up cards with answers to questions such as, “What is beauty?”

The class came to fruition when Unidas, the teen component of the Women’s Foundation of Southern Arizona, awarded Edge High School $2,050 in grant money to run the one-time program, says Anne Ortiz, the school’s finance director. It was planned for last summer but got postponed by scheduling conflicts.

Grant money funded the purchases of two digital camera kits, an audio recorder and subscriptions to tutorials and editing software, giving students hands-on experience.

“They’re working with stuff that will go back to their school, and really, they’ll be the ones probably teaching the other kids at school how to do this stuff,” Scott Griessel says.

Some students also ventured into the community to collect additional perspectives for their projects.

“They’re really learning how to network,” Battle says. “They’re meeting photographers. They’re meeting models. They’re meeting people on the streets. They’re meeting business people. It’s incredible because they’re getting to do some stuff they don’t normally do in our school setting.”

On the last day of class, students huddled around a counter, their prints face-down, yet to be seen. Casey, 16, massaged her temples in the moment before the grand reveal.

Smiles replaced skepticism as she and partner Bianca Castillo, 18, examined their completed project — three separate collages of individuals holding written answers to questions displayed in the center of each print.

“I really learned the outlook of how many people have different opinions of what beauty is,” Castillo says. “Not everybody sees it the same.”