For over twenty-five years, Wendy Ewald has been putting cameras into the hands of children. As an artist and teacher, she has developed a unique approach to combining photography, education, and young people.
This approach came to her when she was working in a school in Letcher County, Kentucky. One day, trying to plan her photography class, she found herself staring out the window of her workspace and watching her neighbor's children play. The game they were playing provided a very vivid image. She wondered whether it might be possible to "ask [her] students to create photographs from their daydreams and fantasies and night dreams."
She went to her class and got them to start talking about their dreams and imaginings. Could they put them into words? How would they describe them? How would they act them out so that a picture could be taken? The students had plenty of ideas for composing pictures-some of those fantasies were scary, some were playful.
To become photographers, the students only needed to be encouraged to trust their own ideas and to be shown how to look at them from the outside, with the eye of the camera.
Ms. Ewald's experience in Kentucky was the beginning of a long journey that has taken her around the world to introduce children to photography and photography to children. She has traveled to Colombia, South Africa, Mexico, and the Netherlands, as well as working in many places within the United States.
Everywhere children are the same. Everywhere children are different. Although everyone has dreams and fantasies, what people dream and how they experience those images varies from place to place.
Ms. Ewald recalls that in some areas, children had difficulty remembering their dreams. Many of these children had to work. There was little time to play. The dreams of other children were very different from those of kids in the United States. In places like South Africa, where until recently many children witnessed horrible acts of violence, fantasies of young people were often close to nightmares. Other students-like those in Chamula, Mexico-experienced dreams as just as important as the thoughts they had while awake. Ms. Ewald has also helped students in the Netherlands to express what it meant to live in their country. Being Dutch, like being an American, was related to their families, the places they lived, and their dreams.
To talk about one's fantasies and dreams and to take pictures of them leads at some point to the question "who am I?" That question is important for everyone, and people in different parts of the world answer it differently. Ms. Ewald has encouraged African-American and European-American students in Durham, North Carolina to ask that question in relation to what it means to be "black" or "white". Students were asked to write a self-portrait. Then they were asked to write another self-portrait imagining that they were members of the other race. African-American students imagined that they were "white". European-American students imagined that they were "black". After taking pictures of themselves, the students then wrote on and changed the photographs to reflect what they had written about their "black" and "white" selves. As Ms. Ewald says, "For the students the idea of transforming the photographs and their own physical features was exciting and challenging." The project provoked a lot of discussion about what it meant to be African-American and European-American in the United States.
Wendy Ewald has helped children all over the world picture themselves. Children's photographs of their own dreams and fantasies have helped us see a little more clearly who we imagine ourselves to be.
To the Wendy Ewald home page at this site.
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