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TIJUANA -- Luis Abel Ramírez, 11, already knows what he wants to be when he grows up: a journalist.
When he was behind the camera, they loaned him to take pictures of his neighborhood, colonia Fausto González, one of the poorest in the city, Luis Abel says, he felt a rush of excitement when he captured images and shared them.
One of his photographs shows a group of children in front of a trash-strewn hill. Another shows a man dismantling a car, possibly stolen. Yet another shows his grandmother sitting, surrounded by her grandchildren.
"I was out on the street, going everywhere with my camera, and I liked it a lot," a smiling Luis Abel says. "People even told me I looked like a reporter."
Some 40 photographs taken by Luis Abel, his sister Elvira and four of their cousins will be part of "Children of the Dump: Photographs by the Children of Tijuana's Municipal Dump," which runs through the end of the month at The Front, the cultural center run by Casa Familiar in San Ysidro.
View the photos at online at www.tijuanaproject.org.
The show, which made a stop at a Tijuana gallery recently, is part of "The Tijuana Project," a documentary that independent filmmaker John Sheedy has been shooting for almost two years about the children of the colonia Fausto González, site of the city's old municipal dump.
It was the children themselves who showed an interest in using still cameras, Sheedy says, proof that poverty is no enemy to creativity and talent.
"The children asked us if they could borrow the cameras for a while, to take pictures of their families and friends," he says.
The six children kept the cameras for a year, taking hundreds and hundreds of pictures of everyday life in the colonia.
The experience of taking their own photographs was a ray of hope for these kids, who live in makeshift houses of cardboard, metal sheets and bits of lumber, says Sheedy, who lives in Durango, Colo., and comes to Tijuana every month to work on the documentary.
"When you grow up next to an old dump and your parents make their living by going through the trash, looking for things to sell, the future doesn't seem very promising," he says. "For these children, art, photography, really is something that will help set goals outside the dump."
José Adán Ramírez, Luis Abel's cousin, says the ideas for his pictures would just come to him.
"I'd be walking down the street and all of a sudden I'd want to take pictures of the houses, of the other kids," says José Adán, 11, nicknamed "El Chapo," or Shorty.
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