By Shannon Hicks

Amanda Cruz, a senior at Newtown High School, does not compare herself to Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz or Annie Liebowitz.

But Amanda is one of the 15 or so students at Newtown High School who decided to take part in the resurrected Honors Mentorship/Senior Project course at the high school this year. Thanks to the course, Amanda has taken her interest in photography to a level beyond what she would have been able to achieve with any of the high school’s current courses.

“I’m not an experienced photographer,” Amanda said this week. “This is all still new to me.”

Nevertheless, two things will happen for Amanda before the end of January. Next weekend, she will have her first-ever public photography exhibit. C.H. Booth Library in Newtown has agreed to allow Amanda to present a collection of 22 of her original photographs from 2 to 5 pm on Sunday, January 9.

Then, on January 12 and 13 Amanda will join her fellow classmates for their senior project presentations in the lecture hall at the high school. The presentations are the third and final component of Mentorship/Senior Project.

The mentorship program was designed to enable students at Newtown High School to build on existing strengths. It also provides an opportunity for further study not available within the confines of the traditional classroom environment.

The program provides motivated and responsible NHS seniors the opportunity to develop a career-oriented relationship with a community professional in the student’s area of chosen interest.

Mentorship/Senior Project, as it is called at the school, is an honors course. It is being taught this year by NHS teachers Allison Zmuda and Jeanette Miller. Peg Ragaini has been responsible for setting up the students with their respective mentors.

Students met every other Wednesday night at the high school to work on their projects and to meet with their course instructors. Keeping their instructors up to date on their projects is a main requirement of Mentorship/Senior Project, as is spending a minimum of 20 hours with their mentors during the five-month program. Students are also required to keep process logs of their work.

For Amanda, it was a matter of being introduced to Brookfield-based photographer Laurie Klein that got her mentorship underway.

“I’ve always been interested in photography,” Amanda said this week. “I had the interest, but didn’t have time in school, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to explore it.”

Amanda’s passion for photography began innocently enough when, as a child, she would collect postcards that depicted nature. The first subjects that found their way in front of Amanda’s lense, therefore, were natural subjects.

Amanda says she doesn’t remember when she received her first camera, and admits she has always been very comfortable using “the cheapo ones, anything I could get my hands on.” It was only last year, in fact, that the teenager received her first “real” camera, a Minolta.

Laurie Klein, the owner of Laurie Klein Gallery in Brookfield, has been working with Amanda for weeks on developing the young photographer’s eye for detail. Ms Klein, who celebrated the publication of her first book earlier this year, a book that concerns hand coloring black and white photography, even shared some of her hand coloring techniques with Amanda. As a result, two of the prints in the collection going on view next weekend at the library in Newtown will be images Amanda has colored by hand.

“I was really lucky I got such a good mentor to start with,” said Amanda, who was even able to accompany her mentor to a wedding at Newtown Meeting House in the early fall.

“That was interesting,” Amanda shared earlier this week. “I learned a lot, especially because when you go to a wedding you don’t usually pay attention to the photographers.

“It wasn’t at all what I expected. It’s so hectic and busy behind the scenes. It was certainly a learning experience.”

Not every student in Mentorship/Senior Project will be presenting his or her work in the public eye, Amanda said. Some of the projects are being presented in a visual presentation such as the one Amanda is undertaking next weekend; others are being presented in written report form, while still others will be presented as oral reports.

The library show on January 9 will focus on nature scenes Amanda has taken in Newtown and Brookfield.

“I just started taking different pictures in different angles, of things I found interesting,” Amanda explained. “One of the things that has always attracted me to photography is how you can present something in a way that is different than how someone else may look at an object.

“I’m really finding that I am having a very easy time expressing myself through photography.”

When she presents her exhibition on January 9, Amanda will have an artist’s statement for visitors to read at the beginning of the exhibition, but her photographs will stand on their own. She has decided against putting captions or explanations with every image on view, preferring to allow visitors to draw their own conclusions when they look at the photographs.

“I think it would have been harder to learn all of this and to understand it so quickly if it had been a photography class with a lot of other students, but this one-on-one work made it so much easier,” Amanda said Tuesday afternoon.

While she is still in the applications process and is unsure of where she will be going to college next fall, one thing is already a definite in this senior’s head.

“I’ll definitely study photography more,” she said. “I want to pursue this in college, and maybe even further.”