Wendy Ewald Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 1 of 6

Background

Wendy, welcome to Berkeley.

Thanks.

What in your childhood pointed you in the direction of working with images?

Well, I grew up in Detroit and I was surrounded completely by images. The library in our house had pictures literally from floor to ceiling on every wall. And my grandfather was sort of credited with organizing advertising and beginning the use of images in advertising rather than words.

And his name was?

H.T. Ewald. He started a company called Campbell-Ewald; and that was really the beginning of advertising as we know it. He had GM's account, really the car industry, a lot of it. So we were photographed at every step of the way by people who are now well-known photographers; actually, some of these photographers I have met professionally. And my family was photographed for Christmas cards and this and that, so photography was certainly all over the place.

So there were images everywhere, but then you were an image. Is that what you're saying?

Yes. So we were on either side of the camera. And with each new technology -- like, I remember when Polaroid films came along -- we got it before anyone else did. We got a color television before anyone else did.

So it was almost like you took to cameras like a duck to water?

Yes. I never thought I'd be a photographer, because that was something else. But when I did, it was clear that's what I wanted to do. And I knew that from the time I was in high school, the first time I made my pictures in the darkroom, that's what I wanted to do. And I never really looked back.

What about early mentors besides your grandfather?
Any women in the family that were important in shaping the adventurous course your life took?

Well, I guess my grandmother was a very strong woman and sort of put my grandfather together. She would travel, and there were exotic pictures of her on camels or in tents in China, things like that. So that was there. But none of the women in my family had ever worked, so that was a jump.

And your grandmother's name was?

Oleta Ewald.

What about books? Any books in particular influenced you in your younger days?

Well, I loved books, and I actually had a photography teacher in high school whose name was also Wendy, Wendy McNeil, who was doing a book at the time that she was my teacher. I would go over to her house and see her laying it out. I was just thrilled by the idea that you could actually do this and I thought that this was something that I had to do in some kind of way.

Was this in high school?

Yes. It was wonderful. She just happened to be starting her teaching career and was there, and then went on to teach in university.

Where did you go to college?

I went to Antioch.

And that would have been what years?

It was 1969 to '74.

So, a turbulent time?

Yes. It was a very interesting time. I was just hearing the other night from a classmate of mine that during that time the college was actually closed down for quite a bit of time. There were strikes and various things, and so politically, we grew up pretty quickly. I was just learning, now it has finally come out that the FBI was actually involved in a lot of those strikes, which I hadn't heard before.

How did that turbulence affect the values that you brought to photography and mixed with the values from your growing-up years?

I think what was important to me was actually growing up in Detroit and seeing the turbulence going on, like the riots. The summer after the riots, I worked in a program for high school referrals. It was essentially a program to keep those kids who would riot off the streets so it wouldn't happen again. And it was wild that I was in this situation, because I was part of a team of teachers, almost all of them African American teachers, and I was seventeen, to teach a black history course. This was 1968, and it was a time when Betty Shabazz and a lot of people were around. It was hard, actually, for me to go back to school after that, because that, to me, seemed like the real world. So Antioch was sort of a reflection to me of what I'd seen outside.

Did you make the connection early with the camera, here, in this kind of social work?

Well, when I worked in the black history course it was before I had started taking pictures. But I ended up being the visual reference person, and so I made all kinds of charts and things to put up that we could use. I think that led to an interest in using images.

How did the images that you created impact this group that you were working with?

I think that it was a more direct way of talking about history, because history can be a very dry thing, especially to these kids who probably hadn't had much experience with it. For them to actually see people who were themselves, in a sense, in different times helped get people excited about history.

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