Search results for ""Author Wendy Ewald""

In 1990, a year before the Zapatistas’ armed revolt, Wendy Ewald was invited to conduct photography classes for Mayan, Ladino, and Tzotzil children living in Chiapas, the southernmost province of Mexico. The sponsoring organization was the Mayan writers’ cooperative, Sna Jtz-ibajom (The House of the Writers). While cameras and camcorders were hardly novelties in Chiapas, they were generally used by tourists whose picture-taking reinforced their own cultural biases. Ewald did not take pictures; instead she guided her students in taking their own pictures of their daily lives, dreams, desires, and fantasies. These briefs resonated with the importances held by dreams in Mayan culture, which considers them as real as waking life. The resulting project, The Devil is leaving his Cave, is a unique insight into the everyday realities of life in Mayan communities just before the devastation of the Zapatista uprising. This book brings together Ewald’s original project with new work made in collaboration with fifteen young Mexican Americans living in Chicago, coordinated with the help of Centro Romero, an immigrant service organisation. These images respond to many of the same subjects as those by Ewald’s 1990s students, with an emphasis now on capturing inner lives and dreams as a way of reckoning with the unvoiced experiences of immigration. The themes of restriction and self-reflection that emerged from this new work were intensified by being made in part under COVID lockdown. Together, the Chiapas and Chicago projects trace the differences between growing up in different Mexican geographies with diverse histories, while holding on to the universal joys and sorrows of childhood.

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Teaching in the Appalachian Mountains, Wendy Ewald gave her schoolchildren cameras, asking them to record their most intimate dreams and fears through the photographs they made and the accompanying interviews.

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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.

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A new, revolutionary history of photography from a stellar team of writers and thinkers that challenges all existing narratives by focusing on the complex collaborations between photographer and subject. Collaboration presents a groundbreaking and multifaceted history of photography which explores photography through the lens of collaboration, challenging the dominant narratives around photographic history and authorship. In a vast, collaborative effort led by five of the great thinkers and practitioners in photography that includes more than 550 photographs and over 80 text contributors, this book breaks apart photography’s ‘single creator’ tradition by bringing to light tangible traces of collaboration – the various relationships, exchanges and interactions which occur between all participants in the event of photography. This book will provide the keys to understanding and decoding the complex politics of seeing. The conditions of collaboration in photography are explored through over 100 photography projects, divided into eight thematic chapters. The photographs from each project are presented non-hierarchically alongside quotes, testimonies, and short texts by guest contributors. These networks of texts and images provide perspective on a vast array of photographic themes, from Araki’s provocative portraits of women to archival files from the Spanish Civil War. Collaboration is not an ultimate account of what photography is, does, or means. Rather, the book is an inspiration for teaching and an open invitation to scholars, activists, photographers and others to practice always with and alongside others and participate actively in this engagement and enquiry.

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