Photographer Wendy Ewald remembers the world of loss, sorrow and survival that emerged when she gave Appalachian kids $10 cameras and told them to shoot their lives – and dreams
Wendy Ewald travelled to Letcher County, Kentucky, in the winter of 1976. She was 25 and not long out of college in New York, where she had trained as a teacher before discovering photography. “I was still a kid,” she says, “and I arrived in a place that was very remote and where everyone knew everyone else, but somehow I found it very easy to fit in.”
So much so that she remained there for six years, working in three schools, where she built darkrooms and taught practical photography, printing and book-making to children who, until then, had never thought their everyday lives were worth recording. “I bought a bunch of Instamatic cameras and sold them to the kids at $10 each,” she says. “I wanted to instil in them the sense that what they were doing really meant something. I felt it was somehow important that they owned their own cameras and valued them.”
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