Maebel Wampler is an 8th grader at The Dummerston Central School where she finds herself among 150 other students. Next year she goes to BUHS with a student body of 800. If anyone is ready for that transition, it’s Maebel. And art is at her center with photography at its core. She admits to having had a tough time with reading but Art caught her attention early-on. Ben Ferguson, her art teacher in Dummerston and “ put in serious effort in our one-a-week 45 minute art classes. After his class I’d go home and draw, make collages, model with clay. And then there’s my Dad Jesse who is the woodshop teacher at The Greenwood School for grades 6-12 in Putney. I’d work with him to make a cutting board for our kitchen, carve chess pieces, that sort of thing. Then in 2024, when I was in the 6^th grade, I signed up at Insight Photography so I could learn with kids my age about how to use a camera and process film, enlarge…... This was my BIG OPENING of a BIG DOOR. And as it happened my first photography class there was the day of a full solar eclipse!”
Insight Photography, a nonprofit school for school-aged children, was founded in 1992 by John Willis and Bill Ledger, both “analog photographers” then. That is, they photographed with film. (Digital photography, now also taught at Insight, came along later.) Insight started at The Teen Center where Willis and Ledger created a safe space for kids. The mentors helped kids find their “voice” as photographers. They taught creativity. They provided all the gear and kids’ parents paid what they could afford. All kids were equal. All those precepts remain in place in the new Insight classrooms.
When 8^th grader Maebel goes to a particular class with two or three classmates, she walks Main Street and then goes to the Insight classrooms located behind Key Bank on the back ground floor. The entry door is at the far end of the alley between Penelope Wurr’s shop and Mitchell Giddings Art Gallery. Upon arriving, she walks into a roughly 30’ long reception room. Adjoined along the east side of the room are multiple 8’ high windows that frame a 25’ long, 8’ high stunning, largely unbroken horizontal view of The Connecticut River below and Mount Wantastiquet across the river, a view that in many ways defines one stunning element of Brattleboro.
The study-rooms are arrayed to her left: a classroom, a dark room, a processing room, a digital lab and a photo gallery to showcase, on average, the work of around 150 students a year. The digital lab has twelve brand new Apple Computers (recently purchased through a grant) and supported by Brown Computers. It is in these computers that students store and edit their images. At the heart of the matter on the walls of these rooms are hundreds of students’ photos. All this was light to Maebel’s eyes when this 6^th grader first heard about Insight in 2024.
She said, “What do we do here? For example, in September, 2025, when I was working with our Photo Group, we decided on a project. We planned to make photographic portraits of Brattleboro people in general, with particular focus on shop owners. These would be candid portraits, snapshots really, of a moment in time and place. We tried some posing shots too when we got started. We then edited and selected the best and displayed them at December Gallery Walk. The next two photo clubs will carry this project on – a kind of “legacy project.”
“In order to focus our thinking on who to photograph, we in my club of three made a list of as many local businesses or organizations as we could. We then wrote up consent forms. In the end we chose to focus primarily on people at New England Youth Theater, The Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, Echo Restaurant, Marigolds as well as Mitchell Giddings Art Gallery.
“Once we choose a person in each- for example, Shannon at NEYT – two or three of us go as a group to take LOTS of phots of her in different spots in the theater or outside it. Then we’d take pictures of her in different lights or backgrounds. Then back to Insight to develop and edit the pictures. Another time during Gallery Walk we photographed people in front of many of the murals in town.
“None of us really knew each other before we would go into town on a shoot but we got to know one another as we worked together. Then we’d go back to the editing studio to work and learn together under our teacher, Rachel Boettcher. And we’d say, “Do you remember last year when we did our first shoot and we got back here an said, “Oh No!, what am I doing here! But we learned! The cool thing is that we’d find ourselves learning in a class with an 11 year old and a 17 year old. It was all a bonding experience.”
Rachel Boettcher, their teacher and Insight’s Program Director told this writer, “Kids come here for classes organized in 8-week blocks meeting once a week for two hours.) In our “Intro” course, kids learn how to photograph with digital and analog cameras: the mechanics of it all: exposure, apertures, shutter speed, how to compose an image, the pros and cons of color vs. black and white, AND how to express themselves through subject matter. We teach them about still life photos, nature or people photography and how to create dramatic images. We also teach digital videography. Students make five-minute films that are presented on BCTV.”
Confidence comes from all this conscious free-wheeling. Mabel, now only two years into learning, has had multitudes of experience and can now teach newcomers the basics of both digital and analog photography. She’s had significant experience with Pentax K100 cameras with print film; for digital cameras -A Canon T8i or R50 as well as a Nikon D850.
So what’s next for Maebel? “I want to become a photojournalist or maybe a Red Bull-sponsored surfer photographer. I’m already skiing every Thursday with Dummerston School so I might become a ski photographer, or maybe next winter I’ll work the ski-jump contests at Harris Hill.”When I asked her what she felt I should know about her as our interview was nearing its end, she said, “I want to go all the way in with whatever I do.” Imagine what this eighth grader will do with her camera when she goes with her family and some students from Greenwood School to Ecuador in a few weeks.
©Kristopher Radder Brattleboro Reformer