I first discovered Wendy Ewald while working at a school where I was called upon to help the first graders with their photography unit. A friend leant me Wendy’s book, I Wanna Take Me a Picture, which explains step-by-step how to teach photography and writing to children. Six months later, I took Wendy’s Literacy Through Photography workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico (see To Know Yourself, Travel With a Purpose, by Amanda Coggin) to learn how to carry forth one of Wendy’s missions—“to put out there the idea that it’s important to see the world not just through trained photographers, but people who are living the experience, what they are photographing.” Wendy has found in her work and research that when you put a pen and camera into a child’s hands, it gives them the opportunity to explore what’s going on in their lives. And through her work, she has found that by educating the world’s cultures through children, illiteracy might become an issue of the past.
Wendy started her work as a teenager growing up in Detroit’s affluent suburb of Grosse Pointe. The black power movement was in full swing with the help of people like Betty Shabazz, the wife of the late Malcolm X. Detroit funded a program to keep the young black people who they thought would riot off the streets, so they paid the youth to attend a black cultural program in which Wendy was their teacher. At sixteen years old, Wendy was instructed to teach black history to her peers on the other side of the moving racial divide. They asked her to create a visual representation of what her students were learning by taking photographs. Wendy had grown up around photographs, but had yet to take photographs herself. Once she got a camera, she knew that it was her natural medium. “I wanted to be in the center of change,” she says. “My position as a white woman in the world at that time was something that had never been seen before.”
Wendy moved on to Antioch College where her work with photography and children began. In Canada, she worked in Labrador and New Brunswick with Native American children. There she first learned it was the children who were worried about the future of their people. She asked them to write stories about the places where they lived. So they set off with their cameras and pens and returned with heartfelt stories they’d written about losing their land, needing education, and living on welfare. Later, she went on to teach children in the Appalachian Mountains, rural India, and the Columbian Andes. It is in these small villages and towns where she has enrolled the children to explore their lives through themes while teaching them the tools of photography. One way she does this is by assigning topics like community. Here the children learn how to photograph different symbols that illustrate parts of their community. What follows is nothing short of extraordinary.
“The world looks different through different people’s eyes, literally,” says Wendy. As one child from Mexico writes (excerpted from I Wanna Take Me a Picture), “The cameras can help make our minds more agile,” and another from a Native American child in Canada, “I took these pictures because I know what I feel about them and I feel so bad because most of the people who work at the sawmill are not paid as (well) as the people over across the river.”
Wendy’s most notable work may have been after September 11th in England’s seaside village of Margate, in the Southeast corner of Kent. Margate is a place where the population fluctuates like the moving tides, where immigrants land to start a new life. In a place where fifty percent of elementary school children leave every year, Wendy teamed up with Art Angel in the United Kingdom to research the effects of coming and going on the children of asylum seekers. Wendy worked with those children who had just sought asylum and weren’t in school, as well as those who had finally settled there and were in school.
Wendy wanted the installation to give the children an opportunity to talk about their journeys and to meet the other kids who had completed the same journey before them. Most of the kids who weren’t in school were in centers, and there was nothing for them to do. Wendy says, “It gave these children something to do that was fun as well as reflect something of their own experience.” Since the children came from Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Vietnam, South Africa, North Ireland, and Sudan, and could not speak to one another, Wendy and Art Angel hired translators for the six different languages.
Larger-than-life portraits of the kids were created, including their faces, the backs of their heads, and one important trinket (of their choosing) that they brought with them on their journey. Wendy felt the placement of the portraits had to represent how split these children’s lives had become, so some of the portraits were placed on the cliffs of Dover with their faces looking out over the sea and back to the land. When the public looked up to see the life-sized portrait of one eleven-year-old asylum seeker from Belarus, he had written on his portrait, “It happened that I had to leave my lovely city.”
For one girl’s portrait from South Africa, she showed the personal items she had brought on her journey: flip flops and two copies of The Principles of Islam. Shortly thereafter, the girl’s face and back of her head (in the photo) were burned by vandals. Although saddened, Wendy realized this perhaps was a clever move by anti-Islamics. “They could have burned the image of the books instead.”
When I ask Wendy what happens to these children and if they succeed in reaching asylum, her answer is bleak.
