Photo by Autumn Meloy
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Early Wednesday afternoon, Autumn Meloy, who is 15, was draped in a chair in the foyer of the Mountain View Boys & Girls Club, watching television. She had on plaid pajama pants slashed and reassembled with safety pins and a sweatshirt covered with sarcastic buttons, including one that read, "I just pretend to care."

I came to talk to her after I saw her photographs for a First Friday exhibition that opens tonight at the downtown Kaladi Brothers. She and five other teenagers were given disposable cameras and asked to capture images from their lives in Mountain View during Photovoice, an Anchorage United for Youth project with photographer Oscar Avellaneda and social worker Laura Norton-Cruz over the summer. It was part of a larger project in the neighborhood meant to assess local social service needs.

The teenagers produced a collection of quiet scenes, which taken together form a street-level portrait of one of the city's poorest and most diverse neighborhoods. Rooftops in relief at sunset, asphalt made abstract with a tangle of tire marks, dirt pounded smooth around an old recliner in a yard, a bleached-out car in front of a used-up looking house, a girl making chalk drawings in the street.

At the club, squeaks and thumps from pick-up basketball carried from the gym. Someone's phone played a hip-hop ringtone. Meloy took me into the teen room, a space with shabby carpet, a foosball table, and a big-screen television.

She's a freshman at East High School. She lives with her grandfather in a mobile home park off DeBarr Road. Her mother and three younger siblings, Winter, Spring and Summer, live nearby. She spends a lot of time in the teen room, she said. She's been coming to the club since she was in grade school.

"It's a place to be," she told me. She stared at her hands. Her nails were covered with chipped, black polish.

I asked her how she liked East, a huge high school where the halls fill with a sea of students at passing time.

"Same as middle school," she said. "Lonely."

Meloy has three pieces in the show. A geometric abstract of the steps and door of a bus. Another abstract that shows the new development in the neighborhood, capturing a slice of newly manicured ground, new bark chips, new grass, new asphalt. A third photo, which she took on a friend's camera, is a color-saturated portrait, a young woman with dark skin against what looks like a red ConEx trailer, yellow grass in the foreground. A final photo, of the shadow of a photographer reflected in a puddle, was used on the show's flier.

Meloy never took any photographs before she was given the disposable camera, but her work has sophisticated feel that makes it stand out. Avellaneda and Norton-Cruz noticed she had talent for looking at the mundane, like a puddle covered with iridescent gasoline film, and seeing something beautiful.

After the students took the pictures, they chose a few and then wrote essays, connecting the images to issues in their lives and in the neighborhood. They talked about gangs and bad landlords. Addiction. Transiency. Depression.

In her photo of the stairs on the bus she takes on the way to the Boys & Girls Club, Meloy saw her own awakening. Taking the photo turned being an outsider into being an artistic observer. It felt like a way to change her life.

"All my life it's been hard for people to see the real me," she wrote. "When I saw the steps, I decided to ascend the steps and leave the past behind and be someone new."

She wants more quiet and less conflict, she told me. She wants to stay in high school. Go to college. Avellaneda and Norton-Cruz found her an old camera, a real one that takes film and has a manual focus.

Next semester, she told me, she'll take her first photography class.

Autumn Meloy, 15, was one of the teenaged photographers that will have their images from Mountain View Photovoice project on display in an exhibition that opens on Friday, Dec. 4, 2009, at the Kaladi Brothers Coffee downtown. BILL ROTH / Anchorage Daily News

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