click! Photography Changes Everything

Wendy Ewald, conceptual artist, describes how photography helps refugee children take possession of their temporary homes and dream about the future.

In 1994, in the newly independent state of Belarus, President Lukashenka promised to end corruption. It soon became apparent, however, that Soviet style authoritarianism remained in force, with harsh crackdowns on opposition leaders and minority rights movements.

In 2004, an eleven-year-old boy named Uryi and his mother left the country, possibly because their Orthodox religion was displeasing to the authorities. British immigration authorities sent them to live in Margate, a down-at-heels seaside resort, with asylum seekers from many countries. The refugees were resented by the townspeople, and their presence largely ignored. They were, in too many ways, non-entities.

With the help of Artangel, a London-based public art organization, I set up a photography workshop for children in the basement of the Nayland Rock, a once grand hotel where the government warehoused asylum seekers until their claims could be processed. Uryi had brought almost nothing with him from Belarus, not even the kind of snapshots most of us keep to enliven our personal histories and transpose our memories, the way snapshots usually do, into the present tense. He, along with six other children from the Congo, Angola, and Egypt, joined my photo project. Since visual evidence of their former lives existed only in their imaginations, the children saw our workshop as an opportunity to reinvent themselves by making new photographs. They were free to tell the stories they wanted to tell, without fear of the immigration authorities scrutinizing them for incriminating biographical details.

I taught the children how to use Polaroid cameras to photograph inside their tiny, crowded rooms. I also asked the children to photograph their dreams. Uryi said he hadn’t dreamed since leaving Belarus; he wanted to make photographs of “a police dream” he’d had back home. In the dream he and a friend witnessed a bank robbery. His friend was shot by the robbers, but Uryi was able to capture the robbers and take the money back to the bank.

The children and I explored Margate together. They took pictures of what they noticed—an extraordinary thing considering that they were in a place that didn’t acknowledge them—didn’t know who they were—and without themselves really knowing where they were. What did the pictures do for the kids? My intention was for the pictures to help them take possession of their temporary home, to occupy it. And perhaps they were able, by reviewing the pictures later, to compare their private images of home—of homes, old and new—with experiences that seemed no less powerful, when photographed, than dreams.

Gradually, as one by one the children left for more permanent housing, I gave them photo albums as keepsakes of their first days in a new country. The albums had blank pages to accommodate images of the future. We shared a hope that the pages would be filled with photographs of the children and their families as they became integrated. I also made portraits of each child, as well as still life shots of the things they’d brought from home. Uryi made pictures of the Orthodox icons he and his mother arranged in a holly shrub just outside the hotel.

Six months later, I met them in their flat in the northeast of England. Uryi radiated pride and calm. He had learned English and was going by the name of George. I asked him to inscribe some words or phrases around the edges of the pictures I’d taken of him. Later I enlarged these portraits into banners and mounted them along the chalk cliffs of Margate and on buildings in Dreamland, the town’s semi-derelict amusement park.

In July of 2006, while we were in the midst of installing the banners, terrorists bombed the London subway. Suddenly it seemed even more important to have our photographs on display. We invited the children and their families to travel from their newly assigned homes to see the installation. When I phoned to arrange the trip for Uryi and his mother, she told me that because of a mis-filed document, they had been taken from their home and put in a detention center, then moved, ominously, to a motel near one of the London airports. I arranged to meet them the following day, but when I called again to confirm the exact address, no one answered. Uryi was gone—deported, probably.

I wonder, two years later, what Uryi and the other kids see now when they look at the pictures they made in Margate. Do they see pictures of exiles? Or of young people on a trip around England? Certainly they were different people now, with different image-histories. Did they make more pictures of England? Did they make pictures of the countries they were sent back to? And the people of Margate—do they think differently about the new refugees they see passing through town?