Co-Op High School | Culture & Community | Downtown | Education & Youth | Photography | Arts & Culture | Visual Arts
The class on College Street. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Khai Hampton crouched beside the Women’s Table, lifting his camera’s viewfinder to his right eye. He steadied himself, watching as streams of water fell gracefully, and then splashed and flattened onto the pavement below. His left shoe lifted off the ground just momentarily as the shutter clicked, and got the image he’d been waiting for all morning.
Two years ago, he couldn’t have imagined feeling grounded in a high school classroom. Now he’s seeing both his present and his future through a different lens.
Hampton is a junior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School (Co-Op), where visual arts students can now choose to study photography with I Love New Haven’s Chris Randall. After years without a photography class at the school, Co-Op added it back last year, as students returned from remote to in-person learning. This marks Randall's second year at the school.
For many students, it is changing how they see themselves, their peers, and the world around them.
Khai Hampton and Jessica Garcia. Lucy Gellman Photos.
“Before photography, when I seen the city, it’s just another day,” Hampton said. “I grew up in tough neighborhoods. Left and right, my friends were dying from street violence. When I started photography, it changed who I am. It showed me that there was another way.”
Randall, who has been photographing professionally for over a decade, said that it’s those very types of revelations that make this work—and two early morning, back-to-back photograph classes each day—so rewarding.
“The best part is I get to experience the world as they see it, the world through their eyes,” he said after class on Thursday morning. “I’ve been taking pictures for so long, that sometimes I forget how to see something like a novice. Their work just blows me away.”
Part of that is Randall’s approach, which gets students outside as much as possible. A group of students (Thursday, it was a class of juniors and seniors) may start bleary-eyed in their second floor crescent moon of chairs, but their classroom is more often downtown, where Randall is quick to point out architecture on High Street, or let students linger under the tiered, chrome-and-concrete entrance of the Yale Center for British Art.
He’s big on taking students through Yale’s campus, from Neo-Gothic architecture to honey-colored light that pours through the windows at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. It gives them permission to take up space on in the middle of a city of stark socioeconomic contrasts.
Junior Jazlyn Urias on Chapel Street. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Thursday, he already had a route in mind when his second class of the day began, students slipping their phones and earpods back into pockets, backpacks, sweatshirts. With High Street in mind, he pulled up an image of a long alley, criss-crossed with lines, on a screen at the front of the classroom. In the corner, Hampton perked up from where he was sitting on a couch. A Canon Rebel sat nestled in his lap, waiting eagerly to click into action.
“Guess what we’re gonna learn about today?” Randall said. Already, students remastered the rule of thirds, which they learned with him in a photo elective last year. He announced that they’d be moving on to finding and using lines. “What we’re doing is taking the three-dimensional world that we live in and putting it on a two-dimensional plane.”
He had students’ attention. As he spoke, juniors Jessica Garcia and Viktoria Bazylewicz scrutinized the lines, their eyes tracing bursts of orange that ran through the image, revealing its angles and hard edges. On the side of the room, Hampton and Daniel Carter translated the lesson to city streets, sun-soaked sidewalks, and windows pushed open in the late summer heat.
Daniel Carter outside the Yale Center for British Art. Lucy Gellman Photo.
They didn’t have long to study it: Randall was soon ushering young photographers down the stairs and out the front doors of the school. Outside, College Street was still waking up, the sun soaking into the pavement. Traffic buzzed and rumbled by. Close to the corner of Chapel Street, the first customers of the day trickled into Claire’s Corner Copia for coffees and baked goods. Three cops chatted outside of Elm City Social, straddling their bikes.
Everywhere, it seemed, there were details that students hadn’t noticed before. On the uneven cobblestone on Chapel Street, junior Jazlyn Urias fixed her lens on the high windows above Union League, then turned around to study the broad branches of a Red Maple hanging over the road. On York Street, students delighted at sculptures jutting from the stonework of the residential colleges. Nearby, Hampton slid into a table, seeing if his lens could focus on the design of a nearby fence.
At each intersection, Randall waited for the light, and then watched carefully as each student crossed, counting them like ducklings. 
Top: Samantha Sims, who was Co-Op's 2020 valedictorian. Bottom: Hampton at The Women's Table. Lucy Gellman Photo.
For students like Hampton, the class has been a revelation. Growing up in Fair Haven, he said, he sometimes felt adrift when it came to school. He found refuge in sports—he still plays basketball and football for Wilbur Cross High School—but didn’t feel like there were professional options for him beyond the court or the field. Meanwhile, he was losing friends to the streets. It stressed him out.
That changed in 2021, when he transferred from Amistad Achievement First High School into Co-Op. Last year, he picked up a camera for the first time. Then he learned about Randall’s work as a professional photographer, including his work on a photo-bus called the Mo Pho that Hampton passed each day on the bus. Something clicked.
“It made me realize that I could do more than sports,” he said.
Now, he uses photography as a form of stress relief. On photo walks downtown and after school, he’s found that the camera gave him a reason to talk to people. Last week, it was an employee from the Department of Public Works, who told him about maintenance to the Green’s flagpole. Thursday, he stopped a Yale student on her way to work on Wall Street, only to discover that it was Co-Op’s 2020 valedictorian Samantha Sims.
He also likes the stillness of nature photography—an interest that had him pausing to study still-green Elm leaves and gentle, crystalline threads of water that tipped from the top of the Women’s Table like clockwork. The second felt particularly special, he said: the water was still off the last time the class viewed the sculpture, which sits just in front of Sterling Library on Yale’s Campus. As he sank into a squat, he played with the settings, adjusting the manual focus for the right snap.
Danielle Pina. "I feel like I can really capture the essence of things with a photo, that I might not really be able to do with drawing and painting," she said. Lucy Gellman Photo.
That same sense of wonder came over Danielle Pina, a junior and self-described “nature photographer” who fell in love with the art form when she was a student at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS). During seventh grade, she started learning film photography and darkroom practice, enchanted with the alchemy of chemical baths and slowly developing images. She praised teacher Kendra Boshea for instilling in her an interest in the craft that has continued to grow.
When the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted her eighth grade year—and then kept her online for the beginning of high school—“I was disappointed,” she said. She went back to using her phone. She tried to stay afloat during a second year of remote classes. Then she learned that Co-Op was bringing in a new photography teacher.
Pina started classes with Randall her sophomore year, when he was new at the school. Just over 12 months later, she wants to apply to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with concentration in photography. She’s seen how a camera can change her own understanding of a place, she said; she has a completely different relationship with downtown New Haven than she used to.
“I was really excited soon as I found out they [Co-Op] were gonna make it an actual program,” she said as she stopped to photograph an angel that protruded from the brick, spreading its feathered wings. “That [photography] was my first choice. I feel like I can really capture the essence of things with a photo, that I might not really be able to do with drawing and painting … I can’t get the same feedback I would get with this. I can visualize it more.”
Jessica Garcia and Viktoria Bazylewicz. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Around her, students turned Chapel, High, and York Streets into their plein air photo booth. By the time they reached a closed stretch of Wall Street, awash in mid-morning cyclists and commuters, they were stopping every few steps to photograph a leaf that had fallen to the ground, a brick inscribed with Latin, a dog padding happily after its owner.
Garcia, who is also a junior, delighted in a shot of a large black poodle that had stopped on Cross Campus, resting in a pool of light, as the owner chatted with Randall. Originally, she took the class because she liked the idea of being outdoors. She returned to it because she sees photography as a narrative device.
“When you photograph something, you have a personal connection,” she said. “You find a story with the photograph.”
As students walked back toward Co-Op, those words seemed to echo everywhere. They buzzed around Midpoint Istanbul, which Garcia said she’d like to see at night, when a string of white lights outside is turned on. They flitted through the air across the street from BAR, as a passer-by took in the sight of the group and urged students to study hard. They hung low in the air of Beinecke Plaza, where students have replaced skateboarders who use the space in the summer.
And they were still very much alive and kinetic on Co-Op’s Crown Street loading dock, where a flight of stairs leads up to the school’s back entrance. Just outside the building’s doors, Harriett Alfred’s juniors and seniors took a collective deep breath, and began a choral arrangement of John 3:16 that flowed into "Route 66." The sound bloomed over the dock and onto Crown Street, round and filled to the brim. For the first time that morning, photographers were so stunned into silence that they forgot to take photographs.
Back in the school, Randall tidied up the space as students filed out, on their way to the third class of the day. While he has taught short classes in photography at schools across the city—Common Ground, Elm City College Prep, and Nathan Hale are a few favorites—Co-Op marks his first permanent gig with young artists.
“I love it, I love it,” he said, joking that the hardest part is the 7 a.m. start time. “I love hanging out and teaching these kids. It’s a bright spot in my life.”