Content area
Full Text
I WANNA TAKE ME A PICTURE: TEACHING PHOTOGRAPHY AND WRITING TO CHILDREN by Wendy Ewald (with Alexandra Lightfoot). Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. 176 pp. $24.
Internationally acclaimed photographer and educator Wendy Ewald, known for her extensive work teaching photography to children in communities throughout the world, has created a unique book, I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing to Children. This is a first-of-its kind book - a how-to guide on teaching photography to children, following the model of Ewald's nationally recognized Literacy through Photography Program at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. This book, designed for practitioners, also opens the door to important debates about photography and representation, photography and democracy, and critical pedagogy.
In recent years, a wave of books has been published highlighting photography by young people. These books, which tend to integrate images and quotes, illustrate the importance of self-representations through photography. For instance, Jim Hubbard's Shooting Back: A Photographic View of Life by Homeless Children (1994a) and Shooting Back from the Reservation: A Photographic View of Life by Native American Youth (1994b) display images taken by homeless and American Indian children to document their lives. These photographs were taken during projects Hubbard established in the late 1980s in order to give these young people the technical skills to complete the entire photographic process, from using manual cameras to developing film and making prints. Two reasons for giving children this knowledge were so they would have skills that they could later put to use and to help them develop a sense of self-sufficiency. Another project, sponsored by the Getty Conservation Institute, resulted in a series of books, Landmarks of a New Generation (Afshar, 1998; Gibson, 1996; Levin, 1994; Picture Mexico City, 1992; Picture Mumbai, 1997), which contains photographs taken by diverse youth from Los Angeles, Mexico City, Cape Town, Mumbai, Salzburg, and Paris. The goal of the project was to help protect the world's physical heritage. The youth were recruited to bring fresh perspectives through their photographs of their respective cities' landmarks and environments. Similarly, the book Shootback, edited by Lana Wong in 1999, contains images taken by children from the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. The photographs were taken by thirty-one children ages twelve to seventeen who had...