or most baby boomers, high school art classes evoke memories of scissors, pots of paste, and semester-long projects that ran the gamut from tame to lame. Unfortunately, most art classes didn't get better by the time Gen-Xers appeared on the scene -- they simply disappeared altogether as funding dried up.The students in teacher Jackson Hill's high school photography class at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts tell a different story. They aren't just learning how to take pictures -- they're publishing them on the Web, and in the process are gaining hands-on experience in imaging software and website construction.
On February 8, Jackson, a local photographer and gallery owner who maintains his own website, gave his students film an digital cameras and sent them into the streets of the Big Easy to document preparations for Mardi Gras. Afterward, the teenagers returned to Jackson's studio to use his darkroom, computers, scanners, and the Internet.
"The Web adds a whole new dimension to the process," Jackson explains. "For starters, here is a medium where you can participate without a huge investment beyond the cost of a terminal. It allows a photographer to self-publish works that for a variety of reasons are not suitable for an editor or publisher in traditional formats.
