Twenty years before the term “socially engaged art” entered the lexicon, Wendy Ewald realized that, when she gave cameras to children, they created “more powerful and more intimate pictures than I could.”
Every photographer has a give-and-take relationship with her subjects. Wendy Ewald has more give than most. Since 1975, the American artist has been entwining photography, activism, and education in a series of collaborations that upend our prevailing ideas of authorship and authority. For months, even years, at a time, she has moved into rural communities around the world—from Mexico and Morocco to India and the Netherlands—to teach local children how to use cameras. The resulting black-and-white photographs are credited to both Ewald and her students, who are quoted and named in the titles. (This started twenty years before the term “socially engaged art” entered the lexicon.)
For a land so deeply entrenched with history and conflict, Israel is not an easy subject to approach in a photography project, especially from a single standpoint. Born out of an idea by Frédéric Brenner, a French photographer who has long explored Jewish
‘This Place’ is the title given to the internationally touring exhibition that presents the work of twelve artists who were commissioned to research and work in Israel and the West Bank, created primarily between 2009 and 2012 by Frédéric Brenner, Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall and Nick Waplington. Together, they act as a heterogeneous narrative of a conflicted, paradoxical and deeply resonant place.
