photography
The intuitive
understanding
of children
''children of mlc." mlc. Metropolitan Learning Center. They're
reading, writing, talking, laughing, being together, being alone,
relating to each other, to Chris, to you.
Who brought them to us° Who is Chris'1
MLC was started six years ago by three dissatisfied teachers
It's located in a low middle class district in Portland." He begins an
explanation of the free school in the dimly lit Fishbowl on this cloudly
Saturday afternoon Upstairs in the EMU Gallery he is having a
showing of photographs, portraits of children in the school.
Christopher Kliks- exhibit will remain on view until this Saturday.
The classes and grades at the center are unstructured. The
Portland School District supports this school where the children are
the progeny of well-educated parents and are placed there by choice.
Kliks' philosophy is: “Why not permit children to grow up in an
environment where they are approved of and encouraged for being
themselves without the interference of adult judgements and ex
pectations Childhood is playhood. a time of experimentation and
Wheatfield
at the
Gallon House Tavern
Adjacent to the Country Squire
appearing Coburg Exit on 1-5
7 miles north of Eugene.
Fridav and Saturday
9 p.m.
November * \ and
Cover Charge. AH beverages served
Styled
to
fit you
344-9444
BARBER SHOP
Phone 344.9444
Photo by one of the mlc children
Christopher Kliks with one of the "children of mlc.”
exploration. To restrict a child’s natural curiosity and creativity
through programmed conditioning into ‘little adulthood' is foolish We
give them too little time or credit for any intuitive understanding of
their own.”
Taking ideas of freedom and the need to rely on intuition from A.S.
Neill, author of Summerhill. and J. Krishnamurti, Chris applies them
to the educational process of relating to children.
His belief in the need for freedom also arises out of personal ex
perience In his younger years, while trying to become socially ac
ceptable and mature, he began to feel something was wrong In put
ting away the feelings a child feels, something was missing. He found
that he had to recall the confidence in intuition rather than putting so
much value in the external trappings of social maturity. “In order for
that delicate intuitive process to work, you have to fee! free and know
that your thoughts have value.”
He transfers that need in himself to the children “You can’t
change a person but you can give them something to
change themselves.”
Out of this rapport with children, he has photographed the effect of
freedom in education.
In the gallery, Chris picks out thoughts from the photographs
“I see people looking at these photographs and they’re asking,
‘What happened to me?’ So many people are not sure where their
center is — what they rotate around.
“Each photograph is a relationship — not documentary. I’m one of
them and they’ve opened up to me.”
We look at a portrait of a boy with lank blond hair looking back at
us. “I know his game and he knows I know, but he knows I’m still his
friend. Someone called it ‘Accepting acceptance though being unac
ceptable.’ We’re friends. I don’t know how to explain it.”
A girl puts her arm around the shoulders of a friend. “Here is
where we are most successful, when the children relate to each other
in this way.”
“I want to feel, to explore how deeply people can know each other
If a person can be entirely free and open, what can they do? I
photograph the world because I can support myself and share my life
with people.”
Later, I went back to the gallery to complete this review. The
usual elements of critique were useless. What did spatial relations
mean against the human relationships portrayed? Not much. What
was composition when children feel free to show what is inside them?
No one posed but was captured by an intuitive eye. There is the
value of the showing. See the children’s freedom to relate to them
selves, to friends, to the world, to the man who brought them to us. He
has given us something to change ourselves.
Charlene Yogi
Across from the UofO Bookstore
THE
LAYERED
CUT
albums
"Sold American”
Kinky Friedman
Vanguard 7!t:$Xl
Copyright 1973
Friedman is another singer-songwriter from Nashville (originally
from Texas), but he’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard from there. He’s
got a gimmick (he’s playing the part of a Jew in the normally con
servative, WASPish world of country music), but he’s also got talent,
enough in fact to prevent the gimmick, perhaps, from ultimately
making him a bore.
“We Reserve the Right To Refuse Service To You” is the album’s
opening number, a rollicking, humor-with-a-point song about a Jewish
longhair who is rebuffed at a redneck restaurant and, ironically, a
synagogue, and then does his own rebuffing by refusing to serve in the
Armed Forces (“Let Saigons Be Bygones”).
Some of the other songs are strained, but Friedman's best work is
worthwhile indeed
Robert Hilburn
Copyright 1973 The Los Angeles Times