Photographs taken by Wendy Ewald and her students in Ráquira, Colombia, are interwoven with personal spoken-word accounts to tell a compelling story about magic, violence, and the powers of seeing.

Magic Eyes is a true-life novel about magic, violence, and the powers of seeing. Told through the voices of Alicia Vásquez and her family, it is a vivid memoir of love and revenge, survival and responsibility. Interweaving the story are remarkable photographs by Wendy Ewald and the children she taught in the Colombian village where she lived between 1982 and 1984. Through these compelling images we witness the passage of childhood as both unique and universal. Magic Eyes is richly evocative – a personal and social history of Bogotá and rural Colombia, infused with a reverence for the truth and power of storytelling. 

This new edition of the 1992 publication features essays by Alma Guillermoprieto and Ingrid Rojas Contreras which offer contemporary reflections on violence, inequality, and religion in the Andean countryside, and a new lens on this timeless body of work.