Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999

Our perceptions of children are only too often distorted by our inclination to project grown-up fantasies of innocence and naivete onto them. Working with children, American photographer Wendy Ewald reveals the lucidity and precision of their powers of observation, gently but assuredly overturning cherished notions of childhood as a paradise lost. In Secret Games Ewald leads you into a world that is as eerie, haunting and threatening as it is joyous and mischievous-life as children really experience it. In 1969, when Wendy Ewald taught photography to children for the first time on a Native American reservation in Nova Scotia, she was stunned by how astute and beautiful their photographs of the environment they were growing up in were. Moving on to the Kentucky Appalachians, she continued working with children, combining her own photographs with the children's photographs and writings. For the past thirty years she has worked with children and women all over the world. Secret Games offers a comprehensive overview of Ewald's collaborative works, with in-depth texts by Ewald tracing the evolution of her work and the ideas guiding it.

--inventive, surprising, and deeply moving....not just the effect she has on her students but the results they achieve together. -- O, The Oprah Magazine, April 2001 --Francine Prose

Ewald’s project is wonderful because it lets kids speak for themselves...they eagerly harness it to the engine of their imaginations. -- New York Times Book Review, December 3, 2000 –Andy Grundberg

The images are of family and home, shot from within, seized through eyes that see like windows without glass. -- The New York Times, October 12, 2000, William L. Hamilton