they were stars

At first they had difficulties with the camera. Instead of framing someone's face, as they intended, they often photographed his knees or feet. There were no windows in the mountain huts where they slept, and they had rarely seen television, so the idea of "framing"was utterly foreign to them: they had never seen their surrounding through anything. I asked them to carry a piece of paper with a hole in it and look through it at everything they came upon. Within a couple of weeks the problem of using the viewfinder was solved.  Wendy Ewald in the introduction to Magic Eyes; Scenes from an Andean Girlhood

they care not

"When I do come into contact with children, I find them a disconcertingly tough audience. They care not for blurb or kudos, literary allusion or postmodern antics. Instead, they study every inch of a thing and are bluntly honest about it." Shaun Tan

Photo from the astounding Wendy Ewald

secret games

"People's conceptions of children are very far from who children actually are..." Wendy Ewald.

One of my heroes, I first saw Ewald's work at the Whitney Biennial in 1997. It wasn't a photo taken by Ewald, but one created -- like the one above -- by a young girl. Ewald is a collaborator as children photograph their dreams.

Denise Dixon, Self-Portrait Reaching for the Red Star Sky, 1977, Wendy Ewald