Editorial April 10, 1989 Issue

Finding beauty within

Ann Kenrick

Jana Taylor set up the American Child Foundation in 1983 to introduce poor and orphaned children to photography and other arts. On the first day of a photography class she asked her students, "What's beautiful in your home?" One by one the children replied more or less with the same words: "Nothing is beautiful in my home. Nothing."^{Quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, January 5, 1988.}

At the end of a six-week class, the same question was asked. Now the children found beauty in the way "light hits the kitchen table," "dirt reshapes the pattern on the floor," and "birds sing in the trees outside the window." They were beginning to find beauty in their own lives.

"I tell them that what they are taking pictures of is their own thinking," says Jana. "It's a concept that they, in their more simple innocence, can assimilate easier than adults— that they are viewing their own interior landscape. They grasp it and take wonderful pictures." A remarkable change took place as the children began to see that true beauty resides within them and is not out of reach.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

Divine Love is the Shepherd