New Releases by Wendy Ewald

A radical new history of photography from a team of esteemed writers and thinkers that focuses on the complex collaborations between photographer and subject.

First- and second-generation immigrants to the US from all around the world collaborate with renowned photographer Wendy Ewald to create a stunning, surprising catalog of their experiences from A to Z. In a unique collaboration with photographer and educator Wendy Ewald, eighteen immigrant teenagers create an alphabet defining their experiences in pictures and words. Wendy helped the teenagers pose for and design the photographs, interviewing them along the way about their own journeys and perspectives. America Border Culture Dreamer presents Wendy and the students' poignant and powerful images and definitions along with their personal stories of change, hardship, and hope. Created in a collaboration with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, this book casts a new light on the crucial, under-heard voices of teenage immigrants themselves, making a vital contribution to the timely national conversation about immigration in America.

"[This book] is the third in a series of three collaborative art projects hosted by Amherst College in which an artist is invited to work with students to explore the relationship between the college and the local community and to produce artworks that bring the two communities closer together...[it] grew out of Fazal Sheikh's collaboration with the students and with members of the wider Springfield community..."--Editorial note, page 233. "[We] wanted to ... make the connection between Amherst's history in the world and an immigrant community in our midst."--Foreword, page 10.

For forty years, Wendy Ewald has travelled the world working with local communities, especially children. In addition to making her own photographs, she developed a method of handing out simple cameras and encouraging people – ordinarily the ‘subjects’ of a professional photographer – to author their own images of themselves and their communities. Because the photographers are trusted observers, innocent of the techniques (and wiles) of professionals, the results have the uncanny feel of unadorned truth.00In 'This is where i live', Ewald redefines the scope of books about Israel and the West Bank. Ewald portrays an entire region through its discreet parts. Her subjects are contested sites where many communities coexist: Jewish, Christian, Gypsy and Druze. Ewald worked with fourteen different communities – in neighbourhoods, villages and schools – using a version of the prismatic approach she’s refined over many years. She encouraged a wide range of people – school children, elderly women and hi-tech workers – to take pictures and document their lives from their own perspective.00Cameras were offered to children uprooted by settlements in Hebron, the West Bank; to young girls at Tzahali military academy; to stall owners at The Shuk, Jerusalem’s lively marketplace; and to Bedouin students at a school in the Negev Desert. The collected images, accompanied by interviews and statements by the photographers, evoke the vitality of the region's cultural landscape, including small minorities such as the Gypsies (who are often swept under the umbrella of Arab identity) – not to mention the myriad identities within majority groups, illuminating the manifold meaning of ‘Jewish identity’.

This practical guide will help teachers to use the acclaimed "Literacy Through Photography" method developed by Wendy Ewald to promote critical thinking, self-expression, and respect in the classroom. The authors share their perspectives as an artist, a sociologist, and a teacher to show educators how to integrate four new “Literacy Through Photography” projects into the curriculum—The Best Part of Me, Black Self/White Self, American Alphabets, and Memories from Past Centuries. These field-tested projects invite students to create images representing their understanding of themselves and the world around them. The text includes classroom vignettes, project descriptions and lesson plans, and reflections and resources to help teachers explore important social and political topics with their students while also addressing standards across various disciplines and grade levels. Book features: Photography projects related to race, language, history, and body image. A framework for engaging students in essential social justice issues. A versatile model of arts integration in the social studies and literacy curriculum. Many examples of students’ writings, photographs, and drawings. Step-by-step instructions to help teachers implement the projects.

Guide to Wendy Ewald's exhibition of large-scale banner photopgraphs of children from Margate, hung around the town.

Essays by Ashley Kistler and Edwin Slipek Jr.

In this book, conceptual photographer Wendy Ewald researches the ability of language to create barriers or alliances between groups according to gender, age, and race. In collaboration with different groups of children she created four alphabets: a Spanish alphabet with English-as-Second-Language students in North Carolina, an African-American alphabet with students at an elementary school in Cleveland, a White Girls alphabet at a boarding school in Massachusetts, and an Arabic alphabet with students at a middle school in Queens, New York. The children collaborated with Ewald to create photographs of objects they chose to represent each letter of their alphabets, objects they picked with a particular eye to the cultural nature of the alphabet they were defining. The result is a dynamic, colorful, idiosyncratic, and overwhelmingly cross-cultural lexicography.

Written for parents and teachers, I Wanna Take Me a Picture is an accessible and practical guide to getting children involved in photography. Through a series of lessons-from self-portraiture to representing their dreams-it teaches everything a beginner needs to know: how to compose a picture, set up a darkroom, and develop film.

Our perceptions of children are only too often distorted by our inclination to project grown-up fantasies of innocence and naivete onto them. Working with children, American photographer Wendy Ewald reveals the lucidity and precision of their powers of observation, gently but assuredly overturning cherished notions of childhood as a paradise lost. In Secret Games Ewald leads you into a world that is as eerie, haunting and threatening as it is joyous and mischievous -- life as children really experience it. In 1969, when Wendy Ewald taught photography to children for the first time on a Native American reservation in Nova Scotia, she was stunned by how astute and beautiful their photographs of the environment they were growing up in were. Moving on to the Kentucky Appalachians, she continued working with children, combining her own photographs with the children's photographs and writings. For the past thirty years she has worked with children and women all over the world. Secret Games offers a comprehensive overview of Ewald's collaborative works, with in-depth texts by Ewald tracing the evolution of her work and the ideas guiding it.

The work of contemporary photographers Reineke Dijkstra, Wendy Ewald and Paul Seawright is presented here under the conceptual auspice of identity and youth.

Photographs and narratives feature the children of rural India

Nonfiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Photography. MAGIC EYES is a collaboration that grew out of Wendy Ewald's experiences in the village of Raquira in the Colombian Andes between 1982 and 1984. The book combines photographs taken by Ewald and her students with stories told by two local women, Maria Vasquez and her daughter, Alicia. Together, Ewald's students and the Vasquezes present the images and experiences of what Barbara Majuica has called "the rich Andean folk culture, in which magic and nature are inseparable components of equal value." The magic eyes belong to Alicia, who recounts her story of the evil eye, which she associates with the camera lens. Alicia and her mother powerfully convey the difficult life in the squatter settlements outside of Bogata. Great poverty and violence are seen through eyes taught from early in life to notice the magical; the results are deeply poetical. The New York Times has called MAGIC EYES "moving, intimate, and unsparing."

Photographs chosen from those taken by children aged between 6 with 14 in the Appalachian Region of southeastern Kentucky, and the words from conversations with 8 children aged between 11 and 13.