Wendy Ewald has been making photographs with children for over 50 years. Her vast body of ongoing work is a treasure trove of insights into childhood, culture, teaching and learning. The basic move that separates her from other important photographers of children is that at the heart of her process is handing the camera over to the child. She is singleminded in her determination to hand over the “means of production” to the students she works with.
What does it mean to “hand over” the ability to do something? This is where Wendy Ewald can lead the way. Yes, in an important way you have to give the camera to the kids, they need to take it out of your hands and begin to use it for themselves, and you have to get out of the way. A speech teacher that does all the talking is never going to be of much use to the students he or she teaches. She describes the boldness of the photographs taken by the group of kids she was working with on an Indian reservation in Canada, photographs that she just wasn’t able or willing to take as an outsider to the community.
When I was a literacy professor for K-12 teachers, the vast majority of teachers were much more comfortable and competent as readers than as writers, so when they went to teach reading they could ground their work in actual knowledge about the practice of reading. In teaching writing they struggled to remember “rules of good writing,” and communicated these rules abstractly as spectators rather than as co-participants, old timers showing the newcomers the ropes.
Being a passionate teacher, one who knows both her stuff and puts in the time to get to know the children she works with, Wendy Ewald can separate what is important from what is inconsequential. The teacher needs to direct the child’s actions to physically use the camera, help edit and develop the pictures, and facilitate and co-curate the process whereby the children can share the photographs with their friends, families, each other and the world. Ewald does this! The teacher needs to engage, explain, demonstrate and scaffold key aspects of the process of making photographs. Ewald writes about the four components of visual literacy in taking and viewing pictures in “I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing to Children”: framing; using symbols; capturing, playing with and exploring time; and developing a point of view. She knows photography inside and out and she is open to learning about the children from the outside in.
Ewald often starts with a child’s desire to have a picture taken of him or herself, part of the “look at me,” pay attention to me, notice me, care about me impulse. In this way she begins to nibble away at the subject-object dichotomy, more evenly distributing power and agency between the person who takes the pictures and the person whose picture is taken. A good book of hers to start with is the Best Part of Me, where she takes pictures of the part of each child’s body that they are fondest of, and then works with the child to write about that part of their body and why it is their favorite. A colleague of mine, Amber Morris, recently used this book for a class project, and with her students created an emotionally stunning wall installation of pictures and words that got at kids’ various understandings of their embodied selves.
Ewald’s 2000 retrospective, Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children, 1969-1999,samples her work during this time period including: the dreams, fears and daily experience of children from Appalachia; children’s lived experiences and sense of community, family and self in Canada, Columbia, India, Mexico, South Africa, Morroco and the Netherlands; and white and Black children’s sense of identity in which she asked children to write about themselves and take self portraits, and then imagine themselves as being members of another race. She writes in her introduction to this work that,
“I knew …there were risks in guiding the children toward genuine artistic expression. There was the risk of challenging a hierarchical and exclusively adult vision of our common humanity. There was the risk of buttoning up in the abstract all uncertainties about innocence, art, and personal integrity…..The truly unsettling thing about children’s imagery was that, despite their inexperience with what adults might consider rational thinking , their images tapped into certain universal feelings with undeniable force and subtly. The inventiveness of their work held my fascination and began to direct my own picture making. …Gradually I saw that it was less interesting for me, as an artist, to frame the world wholly to my own perceptions. I wanted instead to create situations in which I allowed other’s perceptions to surface with my own.”
Wendy Ewald is willing to risk her adult authority, privileged position in society and sense of control and mastery,in the service of being open to, willing to be altered by, and learn from, specific children’s lived experiences. Instead of participating in a project of control and manipulation, moulding children to fit into the dominant orders of the society as it is, she throws her lot in with children, hoping to be useful to them in exploring and representing their own lives. In the process she undoubtedly expands the parameters of her own sense of self and humanity, and generously contributes to a pedagogy of freedom, hope and care.
Her current project, This is The Place Where I Live, documents life in Israel and the Occupied Territories by learning how to “back off from the world” and “let it reveal itself to me by giving cameras to my subjects to photograph.”
“The active dialogue between the photographer and subject (and inevitably the viewer) became for me the essential point of a photograph. In this project I asked 14 groups of people from various regions and cultures to work with me to map Israel and the Occupied territories from within.”
Wendy Ewald’s genius and work lies in letting the light and insight of her students and co-collaborators shine brightly on the world we share together.
Resources
Wendy Ewald’s website. http://wendyewald.com/
Wendy Ewalds latest collaborative project working in Israel and the Occupied Territories http://www.this-place.org/photographers/wendy-ewald/
Interview with Wendy Ewald on her latest project https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7BCvScVjFyU
International Center for Photography https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/wendy-ewald?all/all/all/all/0
Literacy Through Photography Blog, Duke University https://literacythroughphotography.wordpress.com/wendy-ewald/
