(New York: Doubletake Books, and W.W. Norton,1996;)
Wendy Ewald
with stories and photographs by the children of Vichya, India
Continuing the approach she had developed in Appalachia and Columbia, Wendy Ewald settled in the village of Vichya in Gujarat, India for seven months in 1989. As in her previous projects, she lived among the children whom she helped photograph their own lives and dreams. Ewald's book conveys the imaginative richness of this one village as seen through the eyes of its children, but it also encounters and transcends the limits of an outsider's cultural comprehesion. In her preface, Ewald makes clear the uninnocent violence against women and rigid caste system laying side by side with the student's mystification of the camera. She recounts the gradual process by which she steps inside the Indian self-understanding. "I had grown tired of my poor reply to the inevitable village question, 'What caste are you?' ... My grandfather was a Yorkshireman and it's said that the name was originally associated with the guild that family belonged to. The day before I left, I was asked the riddle again, but this time I didn't evade it, 'I am a tailor,' I said. That evening the tailor's family invited me to an elaborate dinner. I did indeed have my place." If earlier world-photography projects like The Family of Man merely skimmed the surface of the world's many faces, Ewald penetrates the depths of shared human meaning and communication one village at a time.
Back to Wendy Ewald bibliography.