Wendy Ewald makes child's play of photography. Since 1969, the American photographer has travelled to often troubled parts of the world - South Africa, India, Saudi Arabia, Morocco - and to communities under pressure, whether from poverty, racial tension or religious stricture. Wherever she lived for an extended period, she collaborated with local children.
While she takes documentary photographs from an outsider's perspective, the children take their own snapshots. Ewald then mixes these up and presents them on the same artistic level, challenging the hierarchies between artist and subject, outsider and community, adult and child. This might not now sound the stuff of wild radicalism, but it was three decades ago, when her project on an Indian reservation in Canada revealed the levels of squalor, dysfunction and alcoholism through the children's photographs, not her own.
At first glance, Secret Games, Ewald's intense, packed exhibition of images and words (the children's stories sometimes desperately moving, other times trite and foolish) might look like any other in which the adult photographer captures children on film. During the private view, a man ranted to me about photographers objectifying children, making them dress up. He blushed when I pointed out that the images he was especially bothered by were children's self-portraits.
As well as being novel in form, Ewald's journeys into very different social and political contexts provide a sense of the status of the image across the globe. In the US-based projects, the children were image-savvy, though sometimes frighteningly clueless about history and racial difference; in Saudi Arabia, women used their children to represent them, so unused were they to self-representation.
In Colombia, children from the slums had no concept of using a viewfinder - without windows or television, the idea of seeing the world through anything was alien. In South Africa, white children could not believe black kids could use cameras; the black children were too frightened to take photographs out on the heavily policed streets.
In Ewald's first non-photographic venture, a new video installation more explicitly directs the children involved, with a clearly pedagogic aim. Working with North Carolina youngsters, Ewald got them to research and role-play different identities: children caught up in the Holocaust, their parents, and Nazi sympathisers. There might not be such a thrilling sense of secret games in this work - the children are doing as they are told - but it still packs a punch, because the young Americans know so little of Holocaust history. In the research period, one child thought Jews were Catholics; another that Nazis were people who made pretty bracelets.
Suddenly you realise that this is anything but play time.
• Until March 17. Details: 0131-622 6200.
