Towards A Promised Land

Helping children express themselves through photography for more than 30 years, Wendy Ewald is a storyteller. She encourages her students to create individual self-portraits and to represent their dreams and nightmares through imagery, teaching them the ins and outs of cameras and film techniques.

In ‘Towards A Promised Land’, Ewald documents 22 immigrant children new to the seaside town of Margate, England. They are all from different backgrounds and moved to the area for different reasons. “Although the coast of Kent has been the gateway to the U.K. for asylum seekers over many years, I didn't want to limit my attention to foreign immigrants…” says Ewald. “…It was obvious that the 'flood' of asylum seekers was something of a cliché.”

The subjects then mark or wrote on Ewald’s own negatives, almost challenging the concept of who makes the image, and blurs the lines between who is the documenter, and who is the subject.  These comments give the audience a brief glimpse into the child’s story and gives each child a personality previously ignored, encouraging the viewer to care about their past. When exhibited, Ewald’s images were enlarged and hung along Margate’s Sea Wall (and later, exhibited around Margate town itself). Nicci Gerrard (of The Observer) described the Sea Wall exhibit as ‘a photogenic Mount Rushmore’, and they certainly have a similar impact. The faces of the children looking out towards the places they have come from, and the problems they’ve fled from. The faces of the traumatised, with a new glimmer of hope and determination in their eyes.

Ewald explained her exhibiting technique – “this… strategy could be interesting for Margate, where people coming to a new place were invisible to the residents of that place. To make them visible in a monumental way around a town would be interesting and provocative.” And provocative it was, resulting with the images being egged and petrol bombed after the London bombings.

When you hear the word ‘immigrant’ you immediately jump to the stereotype, and you forget about the children that are uprooted and come too. Ewald has given a very honest, very human, view on a current major issue in the UK, one that had yet to be photographed in a way that holds as much meaning as this project does. It gives the audience a chance to look past the stereotype, and maybe find something they can relate too. It gives the chance for a change in opinions an encouraging nudge in the right direction (even if initially rejected).

You can read an conversation between Wendy Ewald and Michael Morris here.

Order Wendy Ewald's 'Towards A Promised Land' here.