Mirth and tragedy

For three decades, documentary photographer Wendy Ewald has centered her art on the omnipresent but often ignored world of children.

Ewald has worked to change what documentary means and what it can do. Earlier generations of documentary photographers were often outsiders charting hidden worlds, whether it was Jacob Riis recording the abuses of young laborers and the horrific living conditions in 19th-century New York, or more recent documentarians Sebastiao Salgado and James Nachtwey offering a global view of suffering.

But from the beginning of her career, Ewald has turned away from typical documentary tactics by allowing the children she meets to document their own lives in photographs and words — a gesture that confers empowerment on these least powerful, voiceless citizens. That unique and emotionally gripping strategy is captured in Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children, 1969-1999 at the High Museum Folk Art and Photography Galleries.

In rural Kentucky, India, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, these children offer a glimpse of childhood’s mirth and inventiveness. In the Chiapas, Mexico, segment, there is a gothic synthesis of fear and imagination illustrated in dark fairy-tale images where childish play-acting incorporates masks, guns and imagery drawn from a repertoire of Catholic suffering.

But many of those “playful” images also betray an undercurrent of violence and the troubling dimensions to childhood, especially when coupled with poverty. In India, barely pubescent girls worry about being forced into marriage. The Kentucky images — including one of a little boy clutching a photograph of his Vietnam vet brother, dead of a suicide — recall Diane Arbus and Shelby Lee Adams. They take your breath away with their searing, precise excavation of the children’s small sliver of the world.

These children do not simply implore you to care with their eyes or via a photographer’s composed, illustrative tableau of suffering. Using their cameras, they have achieved what visual artists strive for: an untainted purity of vision. The youth and inexperience of the children turn out to be their greatest gift — they approach the world and their lives without the conventional trick bag of adults, shooting with the kind of idiosyncratic, uncolonized vision that professional photographers struggle mightily to achieve.Secret Games: Wendy Ewald Collaborative Works with Children, 1969-1999 runs through Jan. 2 at the High Museum of Art, Folk Art and Photography Galleries, 133 Peachtree St. Mon.-Sat., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. First Thursday of the month, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Free. 404-577-6940. www.high.org.