ALPHABET SOUP: Impostor, by Wendy Ewald. |
Next week, in conjunction with the Portland Museum of Art’s exhibit "American ABC: Childhood in 19th Century America," documentary photographer, MacArthur Fellow, and fine human being Wendy Ewald will give the museum’s Nelson Fund for Social Justice Lecture.
The Portland Phoenix caught up with her to talk about her work with children, using photography to explore issues of community, belonging, identity, selfhood, and hope.
Looking through the images from your project in Durham, North Carolina, in which you and teacher Emelia Decroix worked with ESL students to create a visual Spanish alphabet, I was struck by the image for “I”: Impostor. That the children wanted that word in their alphabet is compelling and I’m curious what the story is behind that choice?
What happens with all these projects is that I set up the conceptual framework and then we see what happens. With this project, it wasn’t until later that I realized that Impostor had happened, along with other words like “nervioso,” which didn’t seem to me to be kid-like words. I realized afterward how much the choice of words had to do with these kids’ experience of living with their tentative status in the United States.
We had a number of props around, and the kids brought some from home, and used whatever was there to stage the photographs. We were in a trailer, one of those add-on classrooms that schools use when they run out of room. I set up a white background on the porch of the trailer and we just began playing with what we had present.
With the kind of work you are involved in, there must be countless instances where translation across cultural difference gets tripped up, where things don’t move across borders as you’d expect they would, where things get lost in translation.
Often this has to do with my literacy, which sometimes is better than others. When I was in Morocco, the kids I worked with told me they wanted to photograph monuments; not just buildings, but also forms of dress, food, and so on. At first I thought that this was not very a kid-like idea, and that maybe they needed to be exposed to other more playful ways of looking. So I ignored their request and asked them to photograph their families. Months later, I realized what a mistake this was. I should have let them photograph monuments as a way to approach photography to begin with.
I’m curious to know what, for you, is the project you would most want to do if time and money were not considerations.
That changes all the time! I’d love to have more time, as you’ve said, to really be someplace. In earlier years I used to be able to work this way — to just be in a place with the people who lived there and see what the place and the individuals would suggest. Now it’s difficult to have the time for this way of working, but I would love to have that time and not have to say, in advance, “this is what I’m going to do here.” Also, I’d really like to try making a film. My hope is to work more with kids in the Middle East; I’d love to work in Amman, Jordan.
