Documentary reconnects Kentucky students with rare childhood photos from the ’70s

When Letcher County teacher Wendy Ewald gave her students a camera in the 1970s, it made a lasting impression. Many of them did not have a camera in their households to document childhood accomplishments and family gatherings.

The photographs they snapped were simple, yet laced with deep meaning: the black and white selfie, the comical moment of lying on a horse’s back, and showing off an Easter Sunday dress.

The photos were made into a book, Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories By Children of The Appalachians. It’s now being republished and a documentary about the project, “POV: Portraits and Dreams,” will air at 10 p.m. Monday on KET.

“Having a camera gives anyone power, but particularly children,” Ewald says in the trailer for the documentary.

Campbell’s Branch Elementary student Gary Crase grew up “poorer than a church mouse” and his home did not have running water until he was 22 years old, Crase said.

“This was a huge thing for someone to say ‘here is your camera and here is your film,’ ” Crase said. “Because we were poor. (Classmate) Johnny Wilder’s family was the same. They didn’t have two pennies to rub together.”

As Elizabeth Barret, the film’s co-director and producer, interviewed Wilder in his living room, she learning that he grew up hungry as the son of a single mother home with siblings in foster care. He didn’t know how to read.

“He had survived this — his growing up years,” Barret said. “He carries a lot.”

Ewald’s decision to teach at Campbell’s Branch brought in a slice of the outside world to Letcher County and was the beginning of his realization that life existed outside of their town, Crase said.

“I hope they realize this was an opening of the world to the students,” he said.

Without the camera, few moments of he and his family living in Letcher County would have been captured. The family didn’t have a camera and relied on extended family to take photos and share them. Crase still looks at the pictures in his family photo album.

Delilah Sue Brashear said Ewald made her and her classmates feel a sense of pride — something that Brashear later tried to convey to others as a teacher and principal.

“I tried to instill pride in my students,” she said. “I always told them to be proud of where they are from. I wanted to instill in them what they had in us.”

Brashear said she always knew the experience of documenting their everyday lives was special. She said they were poor but never knew how prevalent poverty was, because everyone was the same. When she watched the documentary, she sobbed “all the way through” because she didn’t know what her former classmates were going through.

Brashear said she hopes viewers “feel the love “ and don’t see them as “just poor hillbilly children.”

Roger May, a photographer who will moderate a panel discussion Thursday with publisher Mack Book and Whitesburg’s Appalshop, said Portraits and Dreams is a definitive community work and looks past the stereotypes of Eastern Kentucky.

“It’s not just coal mine and poverty,” May said. “There is a real value to the culture to this place. It’s here for anyone that wants to enjoy it and be a part of it.”

The trailer of Portrait and Dreams ends with one of Ewald’s students asking a question to their former teacher: “Have we left a mark on you?”

The answer is yes.

Portraits and Dreams is like a first love, she said.

“It’s really like the first time you fall in love,” Ewald said. “You have this intense experience. I had really fallen in love. I could see what they could do. I could see what photography could do.”

How to watch

POV: Portraits and Dreams will air Monday at 10 p.m. on KET. The film will screen at Appalshop’s solar pavilion at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Mack Books and Appalshop will showcase a panel at 2 p.m. Thursday, and a KET virtual screening will be Sept. 17 at 7 p.m.

This story was originally published September 6, 2020 at 1:38 PM.