Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians, organized by Wendy Ewald and centered on photographs made by her students beginning in 1975 in rural Letcher County, Kentucky, portrays children's families, communities, and imagined worlds. Working through Cowan Elementary, Kingdom Come School, and Campbells Branch Elementary, Ewald acted as teacher, organizer, and editor, while the children made the photographs that form the project's principal body of work. The 1985 book selected work by 150 children ages six to fourteen and paired their pictures with words drawn from her conversations with eight students.
This distribution of image-making shifts the project from an outsider's survey toward community self-representation. In places shaped by kinship, land, churches, animal husbandry, and coal mining, the assignments examine how children understand daily life and fashion themselves. Family, labor, religion, mourning, play, and violence coexist with dreams of flight, weddings, monsters, and outer space. By joining social record to fantasy, the work also asks who authors an image and how Appalachia might be pictured beyond nationally circulating narratives of poverty.
The black-and-white photographs move between direct observation and constructed scenes. People and animals are often pictured at their own level in matter-of-fact light, within domestic rooms, barns, yards, mines, churches, and graveyards. Sustained access allowed children to photograph everyday events as they unfolded, while other images depended on preparation, direction, and role-playing. In the dream sequences, dolls, makeup, simulated wounds, costumes, and arranged bodies turn ordinary settings into tableaux. Grain, blur, and abrupt framing can heighten their unsettled mood. Captions, and first-person testimony make the children's voices part of the visual construction.
The method developed through accessible analog tools. A Polaroid Foundation grant supplied the first cameras and film. After school darkrooms were established, students began using Instamatic cameras that produced negatives. Kentucky Arts Commission support enabled school darkrooms with enlargers, changing bags, and a rapid stabilizer processor. Ewald taught camera handling, development, and printing, then reviewed contact sheets with each student, with some photographs produced as 8-by-10-inch gelatin-silver prints.
Shown first in schools, a town bank, the University of Kentucky, and galleries in New York and Chicago, the work toured with Smithsonian SITES from 1979 to 1983 and appeared at Side Gallery in 1986. The original book, published by Writers and Readers with Appalshop in 1985, was revised by MACK in 2020 with new photographs and stories by eight former students. A related film by Ewald and Elizabeth Barret accompanied this return, supported by a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2013 NEA grant to Appalshop.
