Light Work’s upcoming exhibition, titled Secret Games: Wendy Ewald Collaborative Works with Children, 1969-1999, features the work of internationally renowned artist and educator Wendy Ewald. The exhibition consists of approximately one hundred images from Chiapas, Mexico, Canada, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

For over thirty years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a sustained evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal, and narrative concerns, Ewald’s work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South America, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, and the US.

Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, Ewald’s project has evolved over the years to focus on questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects, she partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects’ visual inventions. She encourages children to use cameras to create portraits of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams, and hopes. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually “created” a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist’s identity, Ewald crosses the border that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.

The Soling Program will provide classes, workshops, and community-based projects for Syracuse University students throughout the year, including training in Ewald’s Literacy Through Photography program. Light Work has also invited the Duke Center for Documentary Studies to conduct a workshop for Syracuse city school teachers and community activists. The lecture will be the first hosted by the Syracuse Symposium. The exhibition and related projects have been funded by Syracuse University’s Soling Program, the Syracuse Symposium, Light Work, and the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

The gallery hours for this exhibition are Monday–Friday, 10am–6pm. For more information, call Mary Lee Hodgens at 315-443-5785. Light Work is a non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media.