Magic Eyes: Scenes from an Andean Childhood

In 1982 Ewald, an American, settled in Colombia to teach photography and take photographs, and met Alicia Vasquez, a woman whose history seemed particularly dramatic. This book is a compilation of life stories told by Alicia and her mother, Maria, and complemented--not illustrated--by black-and-white photographs taken by Ewald and her students. This hybrid provides an unusual but frequently absorbing narrative that shifts between country and city, mythic history and modernity. Alicia's lot has been a hard one, and she tells her stories directly and colloquially. Her father was sent to prison for murder and her parents' marriage ceremony was discovered to have been conducted by an impostor priest. In Bogota, the poor squatted on undeveloped land: ``We learned a lot about justice and injustice. We had proof that to get a piece of land you had to fight for it.'' Alicia maintains that she has encountered the evil eye; she was raped and her husband abused her, but she survived to see hope in her more politically aware children. Ewald has a good eye for details that reveal the dignity of ordinary life, such as the hands of a woman holding a crucifix, and she captures the irony of shantytowns in the shadows of skyscrapers. However, this book is hampered by some of the students' mediocre photographs and an often paragraph-less layout that makes the pages difficult to read. (Oct.)