PHOTOG EMPOWERS KIDS WITH CAMERAS

When you skip a rock across a lake, the rock creates small ripples each time it hits the water. The rock gets the ripples started, but each ripple that is spawned goes farther from the original point of impact than the one before it.

For the past 30 years, photographer Wendy Ewald has had a similar effect on children. She has encouraged children's creativity all over the world by using photography as the medium, and in doing so, has motivated them and others to do the same.

Ewald became interested in photography growing up in Detroit, where her grandfather, H.T. Ewald, began using photographic images instead of words to advertise products. She was often the subject of photographs, and there were photos all over the walls of her house.

After she attended Antioch College in Ohio and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ewald moved to Kentucky, where she started her career as a professional photographer, but felt called to work with children.

In 1976, sponsored by the Kentucky Arts Commission, Ewald began teaching photography to Appalachian children at three schools, one of which was the last one-room schoolhouse in the state. She felt photography was a great medium for children.

"Photography is very easy to learn, and that's why you see so many programs now, because you don't need the hand-eye coordination you need for drawing. You know, you don't need some of the things you need for music," she explained. "It's a very democratic medium, and anybody can learn to develop and print, for example, and it gives them a sense of accomplishment, and also access to expressing themselves."

Photography was cheaper in the 1970s -- the Kentucky kids used Instamatic cameras that cost about $10.

"It was like a point-and-shoot. They all bought their own cameras, and if they couldn't, then they had a bake sale or mowed lawns to make the money. They could all have them. They were all the same," she said.

Ewald asked the children to take photos of everything from their friends and homes to themselves. As they got to know each other better, she asked them to use their imaginations more, and their photographs became more complex. For example, one assignment was for children to take photos that reenacted their dreams.

"We chronicled the events in our lives in photography," explained Delilah Sue Brashear, who was 12 when she was one of Ewald's students in Kentucky.

Through the years, Ewald became close to the children. "I knew all their families. I visited them at home," she said.

And her students got attached to her, according to Brashear, who is now a teacher in Viper, Ky.

"She had become a very important part of our lives, and we loved her," said Brashear. "She gave me confidence that just because I was a child from Appalachia didn't mean that I couldn't do anything I wanted to do."

Ewald learned a lot from them, too.

"The biggest lesson I have learned is how smart and subtle and observant (children) are," she said.

After seven years and two books, Ewald felt it was time she left Kentucky. She traveled the world, finding creative collaborations with groups and children in countries ranging from Colombia and Mexico to India and South Africa.

Her inspiration for her travels varied. At times she would visit a place after seeing photographs of it. Other times, people would invite her to do projects with children in their area. For example, in Mexico she teamed up with a Mayan writers' cooperative that worked with children to retain their language skills.

In India, she taught photography to students who didn't know what a camera was. "That made me understand some very essential things about making images. So in a way that was one of my favorite places," she said. In 1992, Ewald went to South Africa in hopes of working with different groups of young people. During her time there, she worked with children in Soweto and a squatters' settlement outside the township. She also worked with impoverished Afrikaner children in South Africa a couple of years before apartheid was eliminated.

"That community was really frightened. They didn't know what was going to happen to them," she said.

After working with so many children in so many different areas, Ewald was able to observe how traditions and cultures affected the kinds of projects and photography the children enjoyed most. For example, Mexican children were most interested in photographing dream images that were very playful. But in South Africa, the children didn't want to make photos of their dreams.They preferred family portraits and taking pictures of their daily lives.

"The kids in South Africa were very interested in making portraits and made beautiful portraits of their families and friends. Whereas in Mexico they were very involved in making images of their dreams and they rarely photographed their families. But I think they were still concerned with things like family and creativity, deeply," she said.

Even though Ewald has worked with children of many ages, what it means to be a child is different depending on when it is and where you are. "I've always said my favorite age is like between 9 and 13. But that changes. What 9 and 13 means now and what it meant then is different. But pretty much I like working with everybody."

In 1989, Ewald returned to the United States and soon after created the Literacy Through Photography programs in Houston, Texas, and Durham, N.C. LTP is an ongoing program that involves working with public school teachers to make photography a key component of the curriculum. LTP has four themes: self-portrait, family, community and dreams. Students take photos along those themes, which are then incorporated in various assignments across the curriculum.

Students were excited by the work, and interest in LTP spread. In order to touch as many people as possible, Ewald began to teach others to teach photography. Ironically, though she was never trained as a teacher, she found she had been doing it almost her entire career.

Denise Friesen, a former public-school teacher in Durham, was one of the teachers Ewald taught. Friesen was impressed by the project and wanted to try it with her fourth- and fifth-graders.

"I wanted them to have a tool," she explained. "I think kids like photography, and so I hope that they learn how to compose pictures in a way that they can communicate their ideas visually, because I think kids are very smart and have an interesting perspective on the world and have a lot to say."

Friesen tried various projects with her students. One of them involved asking students to take photos of their communities and then compiling the results in a book. Another was to take photos to illustrate a theme they were studying, such as immigration.

Her students were excited by the projects, and she found the act of taking photos was having an impact on them, too. She described the experiences of one of her fourth-graders who had learning disabilities: "He had a really, really hard time every day in writing class getting anything done," she explained.

But when he did the photography projects, he excelled. For example, he took a photo inside a bus station for one assignment. "I was able to ask him lots of questions about it, and he realized that he was the expert on something and knew something that I didn't know about," she said.

Sophie Neff, now a sixth-grader in Durham, was a student in Friesen's class. "I really hate being photographed, but I like taking pictures. It's kind of hard to decide how to place the camera, what looks best, because there are all these different angles you can do," said Sophie.

Friesen is no longer in the classroom, but she is still active in the LTP program, serving as its assistant director of education. She also teaches an LTP course at Duke University with Ewald, who continues to work on photography projects as well as serve as a senior research associate at Duke.

Ewald's work with children continues in many other classrooms. One is in Viper, Ky., where Brashear teaches elementary school. While the students in her class do some digital photography, that isn't the limit to Ewald's influence. "I've been teaching school for 20 years, and there are some things that she instilled in us, you know, like we can do anything we wanted to do. And I try to do that with my students, try to encourage them, too. There's no limits for them," she said.

Over the years, changes in technology have affected the way photography can be taught in the classroom. With the introduction of the digital camera, for example, film doesn't need to be developed or printed in a darkroom. "I think it's more readily available to students. There was nothing like that when we were small," Brashear said.

But other changes have made teaching photography more difficult. Children are exposed to many more media images on the TV, computer and the Internet than they were in the late '70s.

The plus side is that photography is a recognized art form now. When Ewald started out, photography was not taken seriously. "The possibility of transforming reality through the camera wasn't something that people understood. If you took a picture, that's the way it was," she explained.

But to these teachers, it is this process of "transforming reality" that also transforms the young photographers. "It builds their confidence when they learn this skill of developing their own photographs because it's something that many of their parents don't know how to do, and so it just feels like a big accomplishment," Friesen said.

They not only learn new skills, they find another means of expression. "It's also a good tool for getting their story out to other people, so it gives them a voice, because sometimes adults aren't very good at listening to kids. And so when they have their photographs out here, people have to pay attention to what they say."

And it's a tool now enjoyed by hundreds of children around the world, thanks to Ewald.

"What I enjoy most is seeing how other people see the world, either through how they respond to using a camera or when I see their photographs. It's just like being able to look through someone else's eyes," she said.

REPORTERS: Max Dean, 13; Meera Patel, 14; Renee Wellman, 12.

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