LEXINGTON, KY.- The University of Kentucky Art Museum presents an exhibit of works of art made by Wendy Ewald ending on January 7, 2007. In 1975, fresh out of college, Wendy Ewald arrived in Letcher County, Kentucky, with the idea of documenting the Appalachian community in a way that caught the “soul and rhythm of the place.” The problem Ewald found as an outsider was that her camera got in the way of developing trusting relationships.

Having worked summers on a Native American reservation in Canada, Ewald discovered that teaching photography to her young charges gave them a liberating tool for examining their lives and communicating difficult experiences. She went to the Cowan Elementary School with a grant from the Polaroid Foundation for cameras and film and an offer to set up a similar program there. It was a way of providing a service to the community and a means of coming to know it.

The program was quickly expanded to two other schools, with help from the Kentucky Arts Commission, and, over a four-year period, Ewald worked with one hundred and fifty children between the ages of six and fourteen. In the end, it was her collaboration with these students that created the intimate portrait she sought of the community.

She encouraged them to photograph their homes, their families, their friends. She spoke to them about their fears and dreams and led them to capture these in black-and-white as well; she then used the images as a catalyst for the students to talk and write about their lives. A group of their photographs and writings, along with Ewald’s, came together in the 1985 book Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians.

In the three decades that have passed since Ewald first ventured into Letcher County, she has built upon her experience in Kentucky to collaborate with children and adults around the world through photography and literacy programs, in communities in Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Working with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Ewald created the Literacy Through Photography Program to bring her methods to public schools.

Ewald studied photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Photography with Minor White. She has received many honors for her innovative creative practice, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Visual Arts Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation, and Fulbright Commission.

She has had solo exhibitions at the International Center for Photography, in New York; the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson; the George Eastman House, in Rochester; the Ackland Art Museum, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Ansel Adams Center, in San Francisco, and many others. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and the Library of Congress are among the institutions that collect her work.

A number of Ewald’s books focus on her collaborations with children: In Peace and Harmony: Carver Portraits (2006), American Alphabets (2005), Wendy Ewald: Secret Games, Collaborative Works with Children 1969–1999 (2000); I Dreamed I Had a Girl in My Pocket: The Story of an Indian Village (1996), and Magic Eyes: Scenes from an Andean Girlhood (1992). Ewald’s aforementioned Portraits and Dreams is scheduled to be reprinted next year by Steidl.