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How to Purchase I Wanna Take Me a Picture  Introduction by Wendy Ewald to I Wanna Take Me a Picture  How to Purchase I Wanna Take Me a Picture For more than thirty years, Wendy Ewald has worked with children around the world, using photography to enable them to express what they think and feel, even on difficult subjects like their dreams and racial stereotypes. Written for parents and teachers, the book is filled with anecdotes about Ewald's work that make it an accessible and practical guide to getting children involved in photography. I Wanna Take Me a Picture uses basic assignments to teach everything from framing and point of view to how to set up a darkroom and develop film. Ewald's work has been featured in the New York Times and on Good Morning America and incorporated In public school curricula. I Wanna Take Me a Picture brings her expertise to anyone hoping to engage children visually and verbally. "Ms. Ewald was one of the first — and remains the most committed — artists to bring photography into the lives of children who have little else." — Taylor Holliday, The Wall Street Journal  by Wendy Ewald, coauthored by Alexandra Lightfoot Published by the Center for Documentary Studies in association with Beacon Press $24.00 / 192 pages / 60 black-and-white illustrations Read more about this title at Beacon Press Books may be purchased through your local bookstore. Orders may also be placed through Beacon Press at 1-800-225-3362. Introduction by Wendy Ewald to I Wanna Take Me a Picture by Wendy Ewald We hear it all the time: we’re living in a visual culture. Nearly every day we’re warned about the bad effects on children of much of what they see. Little or no thought, though, is directed to the benefits of positive visual stimulation. After children grow beyond infancy, we don’t pay much attention to creating exciting visual environments for them, and once their nursery school days are over, we stop engaging them in visual play. Some attempts are made in our elementary schools. Hallways are filled with children’s artwork; lesson plans are translated on to poster boards with striking images, important words singled out for attention. Not so long ago, state and national mandates defined visual literacy as one of four forms of literacy (reading, writing, and listening were the other three). Yet most teachers and administrators are not at all sure what “visual literacy” means. If they do have some notion about it, it’s usually limited to decoding commercial messages. Even very young children, when encouraged, have the ability to express their complex emotional lives visually. When my son, Michael, was tested to determine whether he should be placed in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten, he was asked to make drawings to ascertain his level of intellectual and emotional development. Despite our protests, he was placed in kindergarten (rather than pre-kindergarten) because when asked to make a drawing of a man, he included his heart and soul. In her wonderful book The Art of Teaching Writing, Lucy Calkins discusses the stages of a child’s development as a writer. She points out that until the second or third grade a child’s predominant means of self-expression is drawing. She adds, “Not only the act of drawing but also the picture itself can provide a supportive framework for young writers.” In time, Calkins continues, children learn to write detailed stories without illustrations. But when they’re just beginning to write, they often rely on their drawings rather than their writing to convey the meaning of the story. In any case, once students do begin to write, very little attention is paid to their visual skills. I’m forever noticing how classrooms are set up — how the furniture is arranged, what’s on the wall, how it’s displayed. It’s disconcerting to come up against a lack of sensitivity about what our visual surroundings communicate to people, and how they are affected by it. This came home to me recently when I accompanied my son to his kindergarten orientation. Outside each classroom (there are ten kindergartens in Michael’s large public school), the teachers had mounted cut-outs of various things — apples, stars, or animals — with the name of each child written inside the cut-outs so the new kindergartners could find their rooms. Each class had a unique symbol. My son’s was an owl. But the owl decorations identifying his classroom were dark brown. The names of the children, written in black on these dark backgrounds, were very difficult to read, especially for five-year-olds just learning to pick out the letters of their names. Inside the classroom, the teacher had taken the time to affix small owls, again with the students’ names written on them, above each of their lockers. But the owls were placed towards the tops of the lockers, high above the students’ heads, and virtually impossible for someone of kindergarten height to read. To little children already versed in our culture’s visual rhetoric, this well-intentioned effort must have seemed incoherent and graphically illiterate. This book describes an approach to teaching photography to children. It grew out of an attempt to address what I saw as the need to attend to our neglected physical and visual surroundings, and the need we all feel to articulate and communicate something relevant about our personal and communal lives. I Wannna Take Me a Picture evolved gradually from thirty years of thinking about how we learn, and how we express ourselves with images. In 1970, the summer I was eighteen, I had a job working with children on an Indian reservation in Labrador. I was very excited about photography. I’d been photographing my brothers and sisters with a 4x5 Crown Graphic, a vintage press camera, the kind that calls for pulling a black cloth over your head to block out the ambient light so you can see the image on the ground glass. In Labrador I taught children with more simple cameras. The Polaroid Foundation had just started giving out cameras and film to teachers who were working with what were then called “underprivileged” children. I submitted an application; Polaroid gave me ten cameras and one hundred film packs to take to Canada. In working on the reservation, I discovered that when I demonstrated how the camera worked to the people I wanted to photograph, everyone, myself included, felt more at ease. Since then, I’ve worked with children in places all over the world — among them an Italian neighborhood in Boston, the Colombian Andes, rural India, the Appalachian mountains, and North Carolina, where one of my students was fond of saying, “I wanna take me a picture.” I’ve heard it said by children and adults many times, in many languages –“I want to take a picture” — when what they meant was, “I want to be photographed.” Their desire to be photographed was as strong as their desire to photograph. My first summer in Labrador, I held a photography class in the afternoon for any child who wanted to come. Each child took a camera and pack of film. A group of about fifteen of us walked around the reservation. I took pictures of my students and their families (when they’d allow it) and other children. I was selective and cautious. The children, however, took pictures of everything they saw: the chief, drunk, trying to saw a board; young couples fighting; a teapot on the windowsill; a great-aunt in her white Sunday dress sitting on the rocks overlooking the sea. The children’s pictures were more complicated and disturbing than mine — and, I began to realize, much closer to what it felt like to be there. One afternoon, a fourteen-year-old boy named Merton Ward and I decided to photograph the cemetery together. Merton split his time between the reservation and South Boston, where his mother lived. He said he’d been deported from the United States for breaking parking meters, so he had to use a false name when he crossed the border. He knew more about the outside world than the others on the reservation. Perhaps because I was familiar with that world, too, Merton and I became friends. He had his Polaroid Sharp Shooter; I had my Crown Graphic. We casually began by photographing the whole graveyard, then moved in closer to take a picture of Merton’s grandmother’s grave. I went first. I centered the white tombstone, shooting it slightly from above so the stone was framed by the grass. In the background, on either side of the stone, were white crosses. Merton squatted down and took his pictures from below. He placed the stone to the right so it veered out of the picture plane. His tombstone looms over the viewer and seems even more menacing because it looks as if it’s going to take off. My photograph shows what an Indian graveyard looks like. You can read the inscription on the gravestone and see the simple handmade crosses. Merton’s picture is grainy, washed out, and the proportions are inaccurate, but his cemetery is a frightening place. No one visits it or places flowers on the graves. Sometimes people see ghosts there. Merton’s photograph reflects that fear. Now, when I look at the pictures we took, my photograph reminds me of the magic I associated with that neat little graveyard and the rugged beauty of the reservation; Merton’s photograph makes me think of the young men I knew who died violent deaths during the summers I was there, how once Merton had to guide me to a coffin, and how frightened I was to look into the young man’s face. I arrived in Labrador three years before the uprising at Wounded Knee, which would focus America’s attention on Native rights. The reservation was already in crisis, its young people caught between two cultures and two languages. Their parents were mostly unemployed. The nomadic hunting life that had sustained them for centuries was coming to an end, and nothing had come along to replace it. Permanent housing was inadequate for the arctic climate; alcoholism was endemic. It was clear that some of the older children were very worried about the future of their people. I asked them if they’d like to create a story about the place they lived. If they wanted, they could use images as well as words. They went off with the cameras and came back the next day with their work. Their pictures and writings made for an uncompromising look at the problems they faced. Kathy Louis, a ten-year-old, wrote: Indians belong to nature and we know more about the land than white people do. But I’d feel finer about being an Indian if only we had better houses, if we had better schools, high schools, colleges, and training schools so we’d be more skillful and educated. Then Indians wouldn’t have to live on welfare. They could have jobs and earn their own money. It’s unlikely that the young people would ever have written what they did without the pictures to prompt them (Kathy’s writing came from the beautiful landscape photographs she’d made), and the pictures would have been difficult to decipher without the stories to accompany them. Benedict Michelle photographed some of the problems on the reservation, like the sawmill, which represented low-paying jobs, garbage strewn on the ground, a barren garden. His text began, “I took these pictures because I know what I feel about them and I feel so bad…” The children’s pictures and words were hardly adequate to convey the difficulty of their situation, but their photo-essays were a starting point for acknowledging and discussing, in their own voices, a very tough predicament. (One of the obstacles to grasping the scope of the problems on the reservation was that the children’s worldview was steeped in an internalized racism. When I took a group of them to see a Western at the only movie theater in the area, they cheered for the white settlers when an Indian was shot.) I went on to teach photography to children in more structured situations. I began to experiment, in conventional classrooms, with how photography and writing stimulated one another. Many of the students I worked with had trouble writing; they would labor painfully over a sentence or two. But when they worked from a photograph that had something to do with their own lives, especially a picture they had taken themselves, they were able to write more — and what they wrote about was their own experiences. After years of experimenting with this method, I was invited by the Center for Documentary Studies to start a program in the Durham public schools in North Carolina called Literacy Through Photography. I found that it was necessary to explain to my students that making an interesting photograph called for more than just pointing the camera and shooting. Asking them to write about the subject they were going to photograph, then asking them to make a list of images suggested by their writing — this was a way to help them organize their picture-taking before they went out to shoot. Having gone through some elementary step-by-step planning, they were less likely to be overwhelmed by all the possibilities open to them once they had the camera in their hands. As the classrooms I worked in became more and more diverse, I realized that photographs provided a much-needed opportunity for the students to bring their home lives into school. One of the classes I worked with in Texas was typical of the rapidly changing demographics in American schools. It included students from Latin America and Vietnam, as well as white and African American Texans. These children had never seen each other’s neighborhoods, certainly not each other’s homes or families. They were essentially strangers to each other. A fifth-grade African American boy told me that he thought the Vietnamese children’s years were “different” — if a girl was twelve in Vietnam, she would be ten in Texas. When the students brought back pictures of their families and communities, each child tried to explain what was going on in the pictures, and the others eagerly asked questions. These days, teachers rarely come from the same community as their students. Photographs can give them a glimpse into their students’ lives. I once taught in a summer school program for children of migrant workers in eastern North Carolina. The families traveled from Central America or from the Florida sugarcane fields. In North Carolina they lived in migrant camps, tucked away, often hidden from view. The fourth-grade teacher I worked with had never seen a migrant camp, and was grateful to be able to look at the children’s pictures. She was astonished by the primitive conditions they lived in, so close to her own middle-class community, and she was able to better empathize with their struggle to negotiate the Anglo world. The LTP program in the Durham public system quickly grew to include more and more schools. Before long it became impossible for me to teach in all the classrooms that wanted a photography and writing program. In 1991 I began teaching a course called Literacy Through Photography for undergraduate and graduate students at Duke University. The course touched on many different areas: they studied photography, the history of the school system, the sociology of the Durham community, current ideas about teaching. The main element of the coursework was hands-on teaching of photography and writing in one of the Durham elementary school classrooms. Organizing this course gave me a chance to articulate a process of teaching intuitively acquired over many years. At the end of the course, the university students helped the elementary school children create an exhibition. Each child used a piece of poster board to make a collage of his or her photographs and writings. The students had been encouraged to express themselves freely and openly, and their posters reflected that frankness. Some pictures and stories alluded to drug dealing in their neighborhood or run-ins with a mother’s boyfriend. There was a marked difference between the openness and enthusiasm of the teachers in their classrooms and the kind of reception the work received in public exhibition at the schools. Six out of seven exhibitions were censored. Many of the teachers and their administrators felt that the content, and sometimes the presentation, of the children’s work wasn’t suitable for display. Indeed, the work wasn’t your everyday “children’s art.” It didn’t look like the other art cheerily decorating the fluorescent-lit halls. This work had an unsettling energy. A lot of it wasn’t very neat, and much of it was about life outside the school. The kids’ work was clearly something more than cute mimicry of grown-up, mass-media imagery. If my students were to continue to have opportunities to express themselves in their classrooms, I realized I would have to work more closely with their teachers. I realized, too, that teachers need the kind of support and encouragement LTP could bring, as well as the opportunity to develop their own creative abilities. Photography is perhaps the most democratic visual art of our time. For most of us, picture taking is a part of our family lives. We don’t need a particular talent, like the hand-eye coordination necessary for drawing, to render what we look at. Even children and adults unfamiliar with photography can make photographs of what they see and imagine. For those of us who have used cameras, photography offers a language that can draw on the imagination in a way we may never have thought possible before. I began offering summer workshops in the teaching of photography and writing for the Durham teachers themselves. Eventually we began to get requests from artists, teachers, and community workers from around the country who wanted to start similar programs of their own. Alexandra Lightfoot, who was then a Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard School of Education, was teaching the LTP course with me. Based on our discussions with people in the courses and workshops, we learned it would be helpful to write a book about our experiences working with children, a book that could also serve as a reference for creating writing and photography programs. We also thought that such a book could be important for families who would like to encourage their children to go beyond making the ordinary snapshots of family life. We have divided the book into chapters that follow the process we use in the classroom, starting with a chapter about learning to read photographs. The second chapter outlines the way in which concepts of photography and writing are combined, and the assignments the children carry out to broaden their notion of documenting their lives. These assignments start with self-portraits and move on to family, community, stories, and dreams or fantasies. In the third chapter we describe how the photographic process can be taught simply, with a minimum of expense. The final two chapters look at how an LTP project can be integrated into a school curriculum and how it might function in a community or family setting. We hope that I Wanna Take Me a Picture provokes thought and provides the tools for Literacy Through Photography projects in both schools and homes. banner image: Photograph by Wendy Ewald. From Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children, 1969–1999 by Wendy Ewald. top |
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