Teaching Photography at the Brattleboro Retreat
by Lakshmi Luthra

From February 28th to May 2nd of 2005 I, along with another In-Sight volunteer Cris Nicole, taught an introductory photography class for adolescents at the Brattleboro Retreat, a psychiatric hospital in Brattleboro Vermont. In-Sight has a long history of teaching classes at the Brattleboro Retreat free of charge.

Shortly before our class began Cris and I met with Joanne Bush, the head of the adolescent ward, and Sara Andrews, director of In-Sight, to discuss the class. We were given certain restrictions by the Retreat. The girls were not allowed off of the Retreat property, this meant that although we could roam the buildings and grounds, the girls would not have access to the In-Sight darkroom on Flat Street. We were also told that not every girl would be able to attend every class due to conflicts bearing on their treatment. There was also the possibility of a member of our class being discharged from the hospital or being transferred to another ward. In addition, for reasons of confidentiality, none of the members of the class would be allowed to photograph another in a way that rendered them recognizable.

Cris and I derived several strategies from the restrictions laid out by the Retreat. . . [One theme that we pursued] was a response to the anononimity that concern for confidentiality conferred on the girls. In addition to this, their past, which weighed heavily on many of the girls, was out of bounds, as were the more personal aspects of their treatment. Cris and I encouraged the girls to use fictional set-ups to explore the things that they were unable to directly speak about or represent. We used costumes and face paint and played around with depicting short narratives written by the girls. There was one student who became interested in creating images that drew heavily on her nightmares. Because this approach to photography did not aspire to literal truth there was a sense of freedom and play around these images, despite their sometimes dark mood.

When Cris and I were preparing to teach this class I felt very nervous about the restrictions laid out by the Retreat. I worried that the class would be too disorganized and too messy to make consistent progress. In fact I found that the girls thrived on the sense of freedom they found through photographing. We would roam the Retreat at night, photographing old psychoanalytic quarterlies in glass bookshelves or pantomimed boardroom meetings. One student was fascinated by the lit-up windows of the Retreat as viewed from the night outside, and especially the shadowy figures that would sometimes flit across the window. I had very few conversations with the students about their experience at the Retreat, and heard even less about why they were there in the first place. Yet as the students opened up to the process of photographing their eyes and their imaginations became sharper and I could see them beginning to explore the stuff of their experiences and of themselves.