In 1991 the Maya writers’ cooperative Sna Jtz-ibajom invited Wendy Ewald to teach photography to Maya, Ladino and Tzotzil children in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost province. Her method was to hand over the camera. Ewald did not take the Chiapas photographs herself; her students did, working from prompts about their own daily lives, dreams, desires and fantasies — subjects that carry particular weight in a culture where dreams are held to be as real as waking hours. What they recorded was everyday life in Maya communities in the months before the Zapatista uprising.

Three decades later the book sets that material beside a second body of work, made with fifteen young Mexican Americans in Chicago and coordinated with the immigrant service organisation Centro Romero. These participants returned to many of the same concerns, now directed at inner life and dreams as a way of reckoning with experiences of immigration that often go unspoken. Part of the Chicago work was made under COVID lockdown, and the conditions of restriction and self-reflection that shaped it are legible in the images. Read together, the two groups of photographs trace what growing up means across different Mexican geographies and different histories, without flattening either into a single story.

The volume is published by MACK as an OTA-bound paperback of 144 pages, with essays by Ewald, Abigail Winograd and Edgar Garcia. Because the pictures come from many hands — children in Chiapas, young people in Chicago — the book is best understood as a collaborative record rather than the statement of a single authorial eye. Its interest for a collection lies in that pairing: two moments, thirty years apart, using the same simple proposition, that a camera given to someone young can describe a life from the inside. The historical placement of the earlier work, and the pandemic circumstances of the later, give the sequence a documentary weight that the photographs alone would not carry.