Portraits and Dreams



Wendy Ewald



Poster for lecture



View from SKCTC Campus

    

     The beautiful fall mountain scenery alone was worth the drive to the Whitesburg campus of Southeast Community and Technical College (SKCTC) to hear Wendy Ewald lecture Monday night.  I was fortunate enough to have two of my "children" (now young adults), Maggie and Ben to go with me. Whitesburg is close to the Virginia border and it is amazing how much higher the mountains are there compared to the ones I'm used to living in between. Such a noticable difference in such a relatively short distance, it took us about an hour to get there, marveling at the blotches of orange, rust, red and gold that the trees are beginning to display.  In a few more days they will totally explode with color, they are just on the brink of it now.

     Ewald spoke and showed slides from her project, "helping children to see," not only in the mountains of East Kentucky, but  in Canada, Columbia, India and Saudi Arabia, to name a few of the other places.  It was enlightening to see her and her student's work and have her personal commentary, as a sort of behind the scenes narrative, to go along with the images. Part of a documentary that is still in the works was shown in which she comes back to Letcher County Kentucky and visits with her former students. They speak of  that time with her and what it meant to them as young children.  Some of her former students were in the audience Monday night.  One man recounted how he remembered Ewald reading to them and how he was touched by a poem that she had read.  He said that was the first time he had ever heard poetry read.  He also expressed that as a child he had read about people that were different from him, that lived in other places, but Ewald was the first person that he had ever seen that was not like him.  In other words, a person that was not an Appalachian.  Another woman spoke about how looking at those images and knowing what she knows now, as an educator and about poverty in East Kentucky,  she could see that they were all poor, but  didn't know it, they didn't feel poor at the time. As an Appalachian I could identify with the feelings the gentleman had of knowing that he had seen somone different than him and of the woman saying she was poor but didn't know it.

     Two images of a little blonde girl, both self portraits, were quite interesting. The girl titled one, "I am Dolly Parton" and the other shot was called "I am the Girl with the Snake."  Ewald shared with the audience that Dolly Parton had somehow come across the photo and wrote the girl a letter.  I'm sure that Dolly could identify with that little girl living in poverty, her hopes and dreams were probably similar to the ones Dolly had growing up in East Tennessee. Ewald pointed out that the portrait of the girl with a snake wrapped around her was done long before any Hollywood starlet ever had a similar shot done to show how glamorous or cool they were.