May Issue 2002
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, NC, Offers Photography Exhibition
"Thinking, thinking, who am I?
What are my hopes and dreams?
What should people know about me?
How should my photo be read?"
- Elissa Rumer
For more than a decade, Literacy Through Photography (LTP) students in Durham, NC, have explored important questions through their photography and writing. This teacher-curated exhibition entitled, A Decade of Literacy Through Photography in Durham, NC, 1990-2000, on display at the Center for Documentary Studies through June 22, represents their work, revealing many dimensions of our community and ourselves. The exhibit beckons the Durham community to consider, "Who am I?" through several layers of looking.
Young people's dreams, their visions of family and community, are made visible by this collection of work. Looking at a set of images in the Family section of the exhibit, we see a mother watching her daughter practice piano; a woman holding a string of fresh-caught fish; a gravesite marked with a floral arrangement that reads "Mom." In the exhibit's Community section we see two kids on a bicycle riding out of the woods; the inside of a church, packed with people with their arms raised high; a desolate street. Dreams take the shape of a boy stretched out on his bed reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; a framed school picture placed by a Hillside High School diploma; a snake wrapped around the arm of a young girl.
Photographer Wendy Ewald, who directs the Literacy Through Photography program at the Center for Documentary Studies, originated the LTP method. Using it, students begin with self-portraits and then move to photographs of family, community, and dreams or fantasies - starting with the self and moving out to wider and wider circles of experience. As Ewald taught photography to children in structured settings such as school classrooms, she began to experiment with how photography and writing complement and stimulate one another. Ewald observed that many of the students had trouble writing - they would labor painfully over a sentence or two - but when they worked from a photograph that had ties to their own lives, especially a picture they had taken themselves, they were able to write more and with greater ease as they articulated their own experiences.
In 1989 the Center for Documentary Studies invited Ewald to Durham to offer a two-week workshop for local schoolchildren. A year later, with encouragement from Durham school administrators and support from CDS, Ewald started the Center's Literacy Through Photography program in the Durham Public Schools. During the past twelve years, LTP has worked intensively in Durham with elementary- and middle-school teachers and with hundreds of children of varying ages and backgrounds. As the program has expanded, teachers and LTP staff members have found new ways to connect writing and photography across the curriculum, and Ewald has collaborated with students and teachers in using LTP methods for special photography and writing projects, exploring language, cultural, and racial differences.
Photographs provide a valuable opportunity for students to bring their home and community lives into the classroom. These days, teachers rarely come from the same community as their students. Photographs can give them a glimpse into their students' lives and, in increasingly diverse classrooms, give students a way to understand each other's experiences. Over the past decade, artists and writers across the country have also reached out to work in diverse communities, and arts institutions have created more varied and stimulating community-based education programs. Within this larger environment, Literacy Through Photography has flourished and set a standard for Innovative arts education programs.
This exhibition of A Decade of Literacy Through Photograph in Durham demonstrates the power and importance of respectful collaborations between teachers and students, parents and children, community workers and their constituents, artists and schools, and schools and arts organizations.
Displaying work from twenty Durham schools, the exhibition includes 120 black-and-white images, selected by the teacher-curators from almost 17,000 archived from the project. The exhibition also includes students' writing and the voices of children reading each other's work. All three of the Center's galleries will be used for this exhibition. Five 8'x8' banners, featuring student images and text, will hang outside CDS and at the entrance to each part of the exhibition. In the Juanita Kreps Gallery, the focus will be on Family and Community. The Lounge Gallery will center on Dreams. The voices of students reading each other's work will play continuously in both galleries. The Porch Gallery exhibit will explore the LTP method, using large 30"x 30" prints and a slide show made by LTP students that demonstrates the process.
Drawing on films that reflect the LTP philosophy,
and that are often used in LTP teacher training, CDS will present
a film series in conjunction with "Who Am I?" LTP teachers
and/or staff will be present at each screening to facilitate discussion.
The films in the series are:
Wednesday, May 8, 7pm - I Am a Promise, 1994 Academy Award
Winner for Best Documentary. I Am a Promise was filmed
at Stanton Elementary School, an inner-city school in North Philadelphia,
where 90 percent of the students live below the poverty line and
come from single-parent homes. In this community, the school has
become an anchor and a stabilizing influence in the children's
lives. The film includes dramatic profiles of young children succeeding
despite their many family difficulties, including drug addition,
foster care problems, and homelessness. "I Am A Promise"
recounts also shares the story of a devoted principal determined
to bring equality in education to impoverished inner-city children.
Produced by Alan and Susan Raymond.
Wednesday, May 22, 7pm - 100 Children Waiting for a Train and selected films from Through Navajo Eyes. 100 Children Waiting for a Train, Best Documentary, 1990 Festival Latino (New York) Grierson Award, 1989 American Film & Video Festival Best Documentary, 1989 Havana Film Festival. This film poetically tells the story of a group of Chilean children who discover a larger reality - and a different world - through the cinema. Each Saturday, Alicia Vega transforms the chapel of Lo Hermida into a film screening room as she conducts a workshop for children under the auspices of the Catholic Church. The hundred or so children involved had never seen a movie, and in the workshop they see and learn about the cinema: photograms and moving images, projection, camera angles and movement, film genres, and much more. And they watch movies: Chaplin, Disney, Lamorisse's The Red Balloon, the Lumieres' The Arrival of the Train to the Station. Finally, each child designs his own film with drawings. And then, for the first time in most of their lives, the children go to the movies in downtown Santiago.
Selected Films from Through Navajo Eyes, an excerpt from Through Navajo Eyes, by Sol Worth and John Adair, is part of the LTP syllabus. We will view examples of the films that were produced as a result of a project in which Sol Worth and John Adair gave film cameras to a small group of Navajo tribe members. Only minimal technical instructions were given, and the men and women were requested to make films about their own lives and culture.
Wednesday, June 5, 7pm - "South African Seven Up" (1993) - Inspired by a British TV documentary project in which a diverse group of 7-year-olds spoke about their dreams and wishes for the future - and then were re-interviewed at seven-year intervals. The children in this film live in South Africa, in the midst of social unrest, racism, and political strife, and the effects of this turbulence are clearly evident in the their words and attitudes toward the world. Almost all of them speak of the violence they see every day - or the violence they want to participate in. And the film captures the huge disparity in the lifestyles of the black and the white children (many of whom live in mansions with pools and golf courses).
For further information call the Center at 919/660-3663, e-mail at (docstudies@duke.edu) or at (www.cds.aas.duke.edu).
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