Available Here: EWALD, Wendy. I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing to Children
Wendy Ewald has collaborated with children, women and families in the art of photography for over 40 years (Ewald 2016). Her work has crossed many continents, races, ages, socioeconomic status and pretty much every other boundary you can think of.
She encourages women and children to use cameras to take a look at their lives, and also their fantasies and dreams.
In her book, I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing to Children, Ewald introduces what she as termed LTP; Literacy Through Photography.
Ewald goes through her experiences and her recommended processes in a way that would be very helpful to a teacher and or photographer hoping to work with children or anyone else in a similar way. She breaks down photography usage beneficial for benefits in its patrons such as language adaptation, cultural understanding, multicultural exploration, or simply taking children's writing to the next level.
This book is somewhat different than her past publications as its purpose is to actually explain the process Ewald goes through in her work (Katzew 2003).
Wendy acclaims that visuals are a child's first language and means of expression (2002:7) and that children's pictures are their voices (2002:10).
Children are searching for ways to understand life around them, to process it, and then to learn to manipulate it. Photography allows them this expression.
Although Ewald warns that teaching photography to children must be done responsibly and with technical and conceptual tools. Any image that a child takes is not necessarily golden, and free expression in photography alone is not enough to make a change (2002:163-4).
My own thoughts: Ewald's program has many good merits that should not be easily dismissed. She is excellent at engaging those that become part of her program, and she brings to the surface deep and critical thinking as well as passion. She definitely gives a 'voice' to her participants. However, although Ewald promotes her book as using photography to deepen multicultural understanding and cross boundaries created by race/color/socioeconomic status I feel her book and the projects she and the children produce seem to promote stereotypes, not discourage them. In poverty areas they illustrate poverty. In areas separated by color she focuses ON color and their differences. She encourages them to photograph their dreams - keeping the term limited to the fantasies one has when they are sleeping or daydreaming. I wonder about breaking out of the box their in - about illustrating their dreams for something real, for change, for a future? Or something different, how they are valued, how they are more than their labels. Some of this does emerge, but it seems to be secondhand. All in all, I do appreciate her work and how it has evolved over time.
EWALD, Wendy. 2016. 'Wendy Ewald Photographer.' [online] Available at: http://wendyewald.com/about/ [accessed October 2019].
EWALD, Wendy. 2002. I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing to Children. Beacon Press: Boston.
KATZEW, ADRIANA. 2003. ‘I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing to Children’. Harvard Educational Review. Available at: http://search.proquest.com/docview/212263467/.
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