LTP | Overview

CDS > Projects > Literacy Through Photography > Overview

Overview

LTP Workshops

Getting Started

Frequently Asked Questions

Publications, Citations, and Links

LTP Exhibitions

LTP Announcements

Overview

In 1989 the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) invited photographer Wendy Ewald to Durham, North Carolina, to offer a two-week workshop for local schoolchildren. A year later, with encouragement from Durham school administrators and support from CDS, Ewald started the Literacy Through Photography (LTP) program, working in the Durham Public Schools to make photographs the basis for a variety of learning experiences across the curriculum. Since then, LTP has worked with numerous elementary- and middle-school teachers and with hundreds of children of varying ages and backgrounds.

At its core, Literacy Through Photography encourages children to explore their world as they photograph scenes from their own lives, and then to use their images as catalysts for verbal and written expression. Framed around four thematic explorations — self-portrait, community, family, and dreams — LTP provides children and teachers with the expressive and investigative tools of photography and writing for use in the classroom.

In connecting picture making with writing and critical thinking, LTP promotes an expansive use of photography across different curricula and disciplines, building on the information that students naturally possess. LTP also provides a valuable opportunity for students to bring their home and community lives into the classroom. Photographs can give teachers a glimpse into their students’ lives and, in increasingly diverse classrooms, give students a way to understand each other’s experiences.

Since 1992 the Center for Documentary Studies has offered weeklong LTP workshops in Durham, attended by artists, photographers, and educators from across the United States and other countries. These hands-on workshops train participants in LTP’s methods for combining photography and creative writing, while also providing a technical understanding of photography. Over the course of the week, participants design individual plans for their own LTP-based projects. In recent years, LTP staff members increasingly have taken these workshops to other settings, broadening opportunities for participation.

Ewald and her staff also teach a seminar at Duke University in which students collaborate with a local public school teacher and classroom in devising and carrying out an LTP project. Students read and discuss materials on teaching, photography, and contemporary social issues relevant to Durham.

With support from Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, LTP has archived work made by more than one thousand Durham students. This archive, with more than seven hundred contact sheets and written pieces, is a resource for researchers and the general public. Who Am I: A Decade of Literacy Through Photography in Durham 1990-2000, the first exhibition produced from this collection, was created by Durham teachers collaborating with Ewald and visiting curator Adam Weinberg, now director of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The National Endowment for the Arts, the Surdna Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, among other institutions and foundations, have supported LTP and funded residencies with such artists as Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Willis, Luis Rodriguez, and John Edgar Wideman. These residencies have allowed Durham teachers and their students to collaborate with nationally known visual artists and writers in finding new ways to connect writing and photography.

banner image:

Photograph by Janet Stallard. From Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children, 1969–1999 by Wendy Ewald.

top