In 1976, the Thorntons and some musicians and artists drove to Austin for the Southwest Black Arts Festival, which was held in a cultural center that reminded Artist of Studio Watts. On the way back, Artist announced to his friends in the car that he intended to build a similar facility in Dallas. "They all said, 'Good luck. You know they tried that before and it didn't work.'"
Artist says he and Elaine met with then-Mayor Starke Taylor and leaders in the black community, such as the late I.H. Clayborn, who were instrumental in helping bring the idea to fruition. Three city council administrations, three mayors, and two bond elections later, the South Dallas Cultural Center was finally built in 1986.
Artist Thornton has only one photograph of himself as a child, a badly exposed, thumb-sized snapshot taken in a photo booth in Fort Worth when he was 12. There were no cameras in his house when he was growing up, he says, and no pictures. "I had no way to document my childhood," he says. "A lot of families are like that."
It was this desire to help poor children create permanent records of their childhoods, as well as to help them find a creative alternative to gang violence--"We give them a camera to shoot instead of a gun," he says--that led to the Thorntons' summer photography workshop. "It's important for kids to have a way to tell their own stories," he says.
What started out as an eight-week workshop with one camera and a handful of kids from the neighborhood has grown by word-of-mouth into a 14-week session with 20 to 25 students each week. An anonymous donor provided 10 35-millimeter cameras to the workshop two years ago, but the class already needs more cameras.
On a recent Saturday morning, 13-year-old Joseph Randolph holds a strip of negatives up to a window and studies each frame intently; the strip curls at the toes of his white sneakers like a long black ribbon.
"This is a good one here because it's got the most contrast," he says with the assurance of a seasoned photographer, stopping at a shot of some paintings and sculptures inside the center. This is Randolph's third year coming to the workshop, and he thinks he might become a photojournalist one day.
"It changes the way you see everything," he says exciedly. "Everything I look at looks different now. If I take a picture of the Ferris wheel, I might take it from underneath. But next I might take it from the side or when I'm on it. I can do things to the picture--turn it upside down, twist it around, and cut it up and make a puzzle."
LaRobbye Washington was 13 years old and not sure she even liked photography when she first started coming to the workshops that she had heard about in the center's summer day camp. Washington, who is 15 now, quickly realized she had a talent for taking pictures. She says the Thorntons helped her get into a special humanities and communications magnet program at Lincoln High School that offered a photojournalism course last year. Washington, who chose teen-age pregnancy as a photo essay topic, put together an impressive portfolio with the Thorntons' help. She says the Thorntons provided her with a camera and film and helped her develop the pictures. Lincoln later dropped the photojournalism cluster, Washington says, but she has continued her photography at home and wants to be a crime photographer for a police department. "The Thorntons influenced my whole life," Washington says. "They gave me the only experience I had with a camera."
Demond Wilson, who met the Thorntons while performing in Zooman and the Sign when he was in the ninth grade, is now a senior at Southern Methodist University majoring in theater directing. Wilson credits the Thorntons for his success;he says he's one of only a handful of SMU students ever asked by the university to direct and produce a play. Wilson's production, Six Degrees of Separation, will open at SMU's Greer Garson Theater next February.
"The main thing I got from [the Thorntons] is the sense that you always go for your dreams. They could have given up a long time ago, but they didn't."
Wilson is also teaching about 50 Plano high-school students speech and theater this summer. One of his students won a national competition championship recently. "I'm passing what I learned on," he says. "To me the knowledge isn't any good unless you continue it on."
But Artist Thornton doesn't need to be convinced that the work he and Elaine are doing with their small foundation can make a difference.
"When you look at it realistically, you know change can happen," he says. "For me it was 30 years ago in Watts. What I'm saying is it made a difference to me, so I'm sure what I'm doing is going to make a difference to somebody.
