Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999. Book Review

For thirty years, Ewald has been collaborating with children around the world, teaching them to make photographs and tell stories about their lives and dreams. Her work began as a student at Antioch College, working with Native American children in New Brunswick and Labrador. Many of her collaborations have been published previously, beginning with Appalachia: A Self-Portrait in 1979, and I Dreamed I Had a Girl in My Pocket in 1996, which documents her work with children of different castes in a remote village in India.

Secret Games is an extensive retrospective of Ewald's projects, with excellent reproductions in both color and black and white, accounts of her experiences working in very diverse cultural settings, and stories by children. Ewald's path has led her from Appalachia to Chiapas, Mexico, to South Africa, to Saudi Arabia, and most recently to the creation of a Visual Literacy program with children in Durham, North Carolina, to address issues of race and identity.

Ewald has been interested in creating communities of children that bridge gaps caused by race, class, ethnic, and cultural differences, trusting that the common experience of discovering a visual language helps to overcome those differences. She proclaims no strong agendas, and in truth, is very modest about her intentions. Ewald consistently steps back and allows the voices of the children to speak. She invites the fresh expression of their rich and fantastic worlds of play and their well-informed and sometimes disturbing views on life and death.

Ewald is courageous, generous, and gifted in her abilities to liberate these stories, which authentically reflect children's lives and concerns.