In spring of last year, The Dallas Center for Photography hosted a workshop at Booker T. Washington High School. Students were asked to take dance photos. The assignment was not to simply capture photos of people dancing, but instead show the way the dancers felt on the inside.
Peter Poulides, executive director of the DCP, remembers the students’ work came out beautifully. But what really made an impression on him was seeing a young high school student get emotional when she saw her photo on the wall in the center’s community gallery space.
“It's great to have taught people how to open businesses, and I've taught technical lighting classes here,” Poulides said. “But the emotional part of this is really big for me.”
For 15 years, Poulides has been the executive director of DCP. The staff has spent recent years offering a community gallery space, free classes at Klyde Warren Park and free photography services for local charities.
The center, located in downtown’s Design District, has announced it will be closing its doors at the end of the month. It's partly due to financial challenges made worse by the pandemic, according to Poulides, and also because the city fails to adequately support arts nonprofits in ways that matter.
When Poulides transitioned the center from a for-profit in 2019, he did so because he felt Dallas needed a community gallery space and accessible educational resources for students interested in learning about what he calls “the most democratic art form.”
“I'm very passionate about pictures being printed and displayed,” Poulides said. “The way I talk about it is that a photograph in a device is a visual art, but when you print it and hang it on the wall, it sort of turns into a performance art.”
He assembled a board and finally transitioned to a nonprofit operationally right as the pandemic hit. The center was able to adapt and offer their programming virtually, but even as lockdown restrictions eventually eased, public participation never quite returned to normal, he said. On top of sporadic participation and inadequate fundraising, the center wasn’t able to secure grants that they had previously relied on for the last couple of years.
The immediate plan was to downsize, but rents are too high in the city. “Another thing Dallas doesn't have, and this is a very common complaint among nonprofits, is there's no place for nonprofits to live,” he said.
The DCP decided it was better to pull the plug now, while there is still money to pay teachers and debts, and possibly return money to funders.
The photography center isn’t the only nonprofit shutting down. Cry Havoc, a nonprofit theater company, closed its doors a few months ago. And Poulides said he’s heard there are many more struggling arts organizations who may be forced to close in the near future, though he didn’t name them.
“It’s a tragedy,” Poulides said. “I built almost every piece of that darkroom over a period of a year and a half. We’ve got to rip it out and sell off the pieces so that we can be out of the building by the end of August.”
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