Studio Visit: Corcoran Photography Student Michelle Yo, Old-School in a New Age

One in an occasional series.

M ichelle Yo looks like any other college senior: She's dressed in Converse All-Stars, a flouncy yellow skirt, blue T-shirt and beige cardigan, and wears fashionably dorky glasses. She's a touch shy and giggles a fair bit.

One thing makes Yo stand out: a photographic eye that seems a kind of gift, like perfect pitch in a singer.

"The problem with Michelle Yo is that she doesn't know how to take a bad picture," says Andy Grundberg. He was once a photo critic for the New York Times and is now head of the photography department at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where Yo just started her final year in photojournalism. "Some people have to work to figure out how to make their pictures work in a complex way," says Grundberg. With Yo, "it just seems to happen on autopilot."

Yo is 21, and came to the Corcoran from a high school on the outskirts of Detroit, where she worked on the yearbook and attended photo camps -- "the usual," she says. Her parents, immigrants from South Korea, own a chain of dry cleaners and she jokes about the cliche. "They think my whole photography thing is ridiculous, just nutty."

She's likely to prove them wrong. I recently caught up with Yo in the house she's sharing just up from the bars of U Street. She showed me a portfolio that's amazingly mature. (Some of her pictures went on view Friday in a student group show at an Anacostia gallery called Vivid Solutions.)

On one of the first rolls Yo shot, with her first serious camera, in her sophomore color-photo class -- the first such class she'd taken -- there's already a picture that could hang on a gallery wall. It's a view down through branches into a messy back yard in Petworth, with a virtuosic play of line and sharpness and blur. Its coloring is equally complex, a tangle of subtle green and yellow foliage given focus by the single dot of red of a discarded traffic cone. Which means that the most appealing detail in Yo's composition is provided by the most dreary object in her scene.

In Yo's images "the composition includes the color, as a part of it," says Grundberg, comparing her to William Eggleston, the great pioneer of color photography whose work was recently shown in the Corcoran's museum. (Disclosure: My wife teaches in fine arts at the college, but does not know Yo.)

What's so impressive isn't that Yo managed to take the shot -- all sorts of accidental miracles can happen when a shutter snaps. It's that, looking at a contact sheet full of more conventionally "successful" images, Yo knew right away that this mess of a picture was the one that mattered.

Yo says she's most proud of images she's made that aren't "immediately pleasing to people." She cites a standard "impact of the recession" assignment she was given in one photojournalism class, for which she photographed the empty, and un-photogenic, interiors of closed Circuit City stores -- "because it was the most banal thing I could choose." Grundberg says he was "blown away" by the images' maturity. "There were no compositional theatrics -- they were straightforward images. It was just so telling about what that shutdown was like."

For all her artist's eye, Yo says she likes the way photojournalism involves issues of "what truth is; the validity of an image; the responsibility you have as a photographer." That's why she's not enrolled in the Corcoran's fine-art stream: "I still believe in the document."