Wendy Ewald
Action-based Photographic
Projects with Children and
Minorities
Performativity: an overview

About Literacy Through Photography(LTP)

Secret Games -- a case study

Photo Ethnography
Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida)
“studium”
“punctum”
http://www.parryandfirst.com/theory/summarycameralucida.html
About Wendy Ewald



Born in Detroit in 1951
a photographer, a senior research
associate, an artist-in-residence etc
in Duke University
has collaborated with children and
adults around the world for over 30
years, working in communities in
Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia,
India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia,
The Netherlands, Mexico, Canada,
North Carolina, and New York.
LTP: Literacy Through Photography



Founded in Kentucky, 1975
1989 the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) invited
photographer Wendy Ewald to Durham, North Carolina,
to offer a two-week workshop for local school children
Ewald started the LTP program while working in the
Durham Public Schools, where she made photographs
the basis for a variety of learning experiences across the
curriculum
LTP Project



Encouraged students to use cameras to create
individual self-portraits and portraits of their
communities and to articulate their dreams and hopes in
visual and verbal collaboration.
Explore issues related to their bodies, their identities,
and their relationships and their concepts of language
Promotes observational and creative skills (photography
and creative writing)
LTP Project



Use their images as catalysts for verbal and written
expression
Creativity in action: self-portrait, community, family,
and dreams
Connects picture making with writing and critical
thinking
LTP Project

Personal discovery: see their own lives

Reaffirmation their own lives via articulation

Democracy of the camera: a tool of expression


Empowerment: the camera gives them a certain power
that they wouldn't normally have
Subjectivities: a sense of real accomplishment and selfconfidence
Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999




The collaborative works with Children over 30 years
under the LTP project
In Canada, Kentucky, Columbia, India, Mexico, South
Africa, Morocco, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and
Durham
Children and minorities
Family, Community, Dreams and Fantasies
A case in Canada 1969-74



Ewald held a photography class and assigned them to
photograph around
She found their pictures far more complicated and
complex than words in disclosing what their life was like.
Proposal for Polaroid Project
A case in Kentucky 1975-82



The elementary school students she worked with were
labeled as the lowest IQ in the entire school.
Discovery: their photos often enacted fantastical dreams,
for them the whole world was a playground; reality
blending into dreams.
Ewald decided to ask children to photograph their
dreams or fantasies.
A case in Columbia 1982-85



Taught in the mountainous region in the Colombian
Andes.
met Alicia and weaved Ewald and her students’ pictures
into the story of Alicia’s life
Magic Eyes: Scenes from an Andean Girlhood
A case in India 1989-90

E collaborated with the Self-Employed Women's
Association

…a lot of murders of women in most stories

Racism and sexism in Indian villages

Religion and myths vibrant
A case in Durham 1989-99




The Alphabet Project 1997
During her years in Latin America, Ewald came to
appreciate the sophistication of languages and cultures
North Carolina has a group of population who don’t
speak English. In school students who don’t speak
English are regarded as stupid.
began to think about photography to teach language.




Black Self/White Self 1994-1997
being looked at as a white lady from a powerful white
university in an African American community
As more and more white population moved to the
suburbs, the public schools became segregated
Ewald designed a collaborative project that looked
directly at the issue of race.
Photo Ethnography + Performative Photography





using cameras to gather data, to discovery, to know…
using sociological understanding to study visual culture,
and
using visual technology to communicate by producing
works with a documentary function
Articulation/narration can be the end of the project
Some projects challenged realities of poverty, class, and
race (ethnicity) by bringing individual subjectivities to
the foreground
Performativity


Challenge of assumptions of the Documentary photographer, which
emphasize the photographic object as evidence, as accurate
accounting , an objective, personally uninflected statement
Photographs created in Ewald’s workshops open up the many
realities of the subject who speak (make photos), reveals
ambiguities and complexity rather than settled meanings of a place
and a person’s life.

Only in making photos would some subjects be able to insert their
own selves into a highly managed and dominated space.

The normative assessment criteria of a good picture have to be
suspended.
Ewald’s approach







The image of a subject is negotiable with the maker
To perceive the world through others’ perception as
much as her own.
Minimal manipulative relationship with her subjects
Photography as an instrument of the idea: photography
enacts/performs the idea
The idea and the process > the final photograph
Giving individual voice to the anonymous.
The question of authorship
reciprocal > hierarchical
Photography as narrative

Recognize what participants were seeing

How they perceive and question the world

Frame the world according to their own perceptions

To create situations that allowed others’ perceptions to
surface with one’s own
 Performative photography generates self narratives
Photography as tools



Photography: with the expressive and investigative tools
of photography and writing for use in the classroom
learning the use of cameras and the written word as
tools for observation and developing creative powers.
Translator:helping children recognize the worth of their
own visions
Photography as resources




promotes an expansive use of photography, building
on the information that students naturally possess
provides a valuable opportunity for students to bring
their home and community lives into the classroom
give students a way to understand each other’s
experiences.
a resource for researchers and the general public