About the Film

Portraits and Dreams revisits photographs created by Kentucky schoolchildren in the 1970s and the place where the photos were made. The film is about the students, their work as visionary photographers and the lives they have led since then, as well as the linkage of personal memory to the passage of time.

Artist Wendy Ewald, who grew up outside of Detroit during the turbulent era of the late sixties, began working with young people using images after the 1967 Uprising. In 1975 she went to eastern Kentucky to work with Appalshop and soon was teaching photography. She built a darkroom in a classroom she shared with the special education teacher and taught photography to the students for the next five years. Some groundbreaking photographs came out of that workshop, including Denise Dixon’s “Reaching for the Red Star Sky,” Ruby Cornett’s “Self-portrait on Easter Morning” (used as a template for one of Eric Fischl’s paintings), and Scott Huff’s “Flying dream.”

At that time, Ewald recorded interviews with the students and edited the photographs and text into a book, Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians. It was named as one of the best art books of 1985 by American Library Association.

The Kentucky students inspired Ewald to develop a way of working that she has since shared around the world — a child-centered vision of making self-portraits, family portraits, images of their communities, and finally their dreams or fantasies. Artists Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman, among others, were inspired by the freedom, sensuality, and psychological depth of the children’s photographs to make similar work of their own. In the new millennium, many artists became tired of the limited audience of the insular art world and art practices took hold that brought non-artists in collaboration with artists into the art world.

Thirty years after the publication of Portraits and Dreams, some of the students Ewald worked with reached out to her through Facebook and email to talk about how the experience of taking photographs had affected them. We follow these characters as we find them now and as they remember their childhood. Ewald was surprised to find her former students so successful and strong. Times had changed, at least for a while.

The film explores and weaves together complex themes and questions important to all who make, view, and seek to understand photographs, collaborative art, lives and education of rural children as well as the recent history of Appalachia.