gloria baker feinstein's blog: wendy ewald

Monday, October 05, 2009

wendy ewald

"Self-portrait" - Sharon Banks

For more than thirty years, Wendy Ewald has collaborated with children and adults from around the world, working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, Canada, North Carolina, and New York. She offers up her own creative skills and mixes them with her students' imaginations. The resulting images are individual self-portraits, as well as portraits of communities and articulations of hopes and dreams.

My favorite of these visual and verbal collaborations is one of the earliest projects undertaken by Ewald – one that I frequently revisit for inspiration. It was begun in 1975, when she was fresh out of college. Ewald arrived in Letcher County, Kentucky, with the idea of documenting the Appalachian community in a way that caught the “soul and rhythm of the place.” The problem Ewald found as an outsider was that her camera got in the way of developing trusting relationships. She eventually approached Cowan Elementary School with a grant from the Polaroid Foundation for cameras and film and an offer to set up a program where she would teach the children photography. It was a way of providing a service to the community and a means of coming to understand it.

The program was quickly expanded to two other schools: Campbells Branch and Kingdom Come School. With assistance from the Kentucky Arts Commission over a four-year period, Ewald worked with one hundred and fifty children between the ages of six and fourteen. In the end, it was her collaboration with these students that created the intimate portrait of the community she had originally sought.

She asked the children to photograph their homes, their families and their friends. She spoke to them about their fears and dreams and encouraged them to capture these on film; she then used the images as a catalyst for the students to talk and write about their lives. A group of their photographs and writings, along with Ewald’s, came together in the 1985 book “Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians” a book that, years ago, found its way to my list of top ten photo books of all time.

I have been a fan of many of these young photographers for years. Recently I discovered that Ewald started a Facebook page when she decided to have a reunion with the now forty-something men and women who she taught all those years ago. Imagine my delight when I saw current pictures of Denise, Darlene and others whose honest and imaginative childhood photography has - for years - moved and motivated me.

The Ewald piece that is in the exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum is from another of her bodies of work. All of her projects are wonderful and worth checking out; this one is simply my sentimental favorite.