A Photographer’s Schoolhouse Odyssey: Exploring A Vanishing Cultural Landscape

GUEST ESSAY BY DARWIN MARABLE

Diana Schoenfeld first engaged in the arts as a child when she studied ballet. While in high school she attended the Actor’s and Writer’s Workshop in Atlanta, Georgia which was an important experience in her maturation as an artist where she learned the value of discipline combined with imagination.

Her emerging talent was recognized at this time as she was one of thirty art students selected from throughout the state to participate in the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program for intellectually gifted and artistically talented students. She was later exposed to interdisciplinary studies while a student at Florida Presbyterian College, St. Petersburg, an approach to learning that continues to impact on her current project. Her experiences in dance and theatre, where attention to choreography and stage set arrangements is pronounced, have interestingly influenced the still life arrangements in this exhibition.

Her commitment to the visual arts intensified while a student at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she studied painting, photography and art history. After graduation, Schoenfeld pursued photography, earning an M.A. degree in 1974 in art, emphasis photography, and an M.F.A. in 1984 in the practice and history of photography, both from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, which was an internationally recognized photography program.

She studied with the preeminent photo historians and photographers Van Deren Coke, Beaumont Newhall and Thomas Barrow, among others. Her M.F.A. dissertation on the use of the picture-within-the-picture is a unique and innovative contribution to the history of photography. It became Symbol and Surrogate: The Picture Within, a traveling exhibition with a catalogue published by the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, 1989. It also contained the seeds for some of the arranged photographs in this exhibition.

The current exhibition, Schoolhouse Odyssey, is a labor of love mixed with personal history.

Diana Schoenfeld first learned about the one-room schoolhouse experience from her mother, Martha Jane Zigler, who taught in Gary School, a one-room schoolhouse on the barren northeastern plains of Brush, Colorado in the mid- 1940s. Today, many similar schoolhouses are forgotten, camouflaged by overgrowth, deteriorating and seldom noticed. Some others are still used as community centers, tobacco barns, museums and even residences.

They are constructed of logs, wood, sod, brick, and stone, and in the West, adobe, but all give testimony to their past as both receptacles and symbols of learning. And some no longer exist at all, except in the memory of local residents as expressed in Circle of Trees, Northern, Ohio (1997), where there is not even a remnant of the former structure. It is truly a ghost school.

Schoenfeld’s first schoolhouse photograph was taken in 1995 of the Eel River Schoolhouse using a 1985 Hasselblad medium format camera - she has not succumbed to the digital age. Her gelatin silver prints are hand printed by herself and toned for archival permanence.

Since that first photograph, Schoenfeld has travelled extensively from the West to the East and into the South on cross country and numerous local excursions to search for the schools.

However, it is the mysterious ghost schools, the ones still standing, but vacant and in disrepair, that Schoenfeld finds especially intriguing. They seem to exude both presence and mystery. Sometimes they almost seem haunted and are distinctly different from the schools still in use. The oldest school photographed, the Historic Sam Houston Schoolhouse, Maryville, Tennessee, dated 1794, is constructed of logs. It is simple, yet certainly one of the grandest of all the schools. Thomas Jefferson attended a similar school on his family’s Virginia plantation. And one of the newest schools photographed, the Green Mountain School, was constructed by teenagers in the National Youth Association, a 1930s New Deal agency, in remote Jackson County, North Carolina. Every schoolhouse photographed is unique.

While Schoenfeld’s photographs are documents in the tradition of Eugene Atget, Walker Evans and others, they also can transcend the document, and often seem more like portraits of these aging specimens of vernacular architecture.

And when they do transcend the document, the soulfulness of these fading relics emerges. Thomas Moore, the author of The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, (1996) writes, “Ruins are enchanting, because the function those things once fulfilled has gone off like a bird flying away from the nest. We are left with objects that have a hollowness that we can fill with our own wonder and fantasy.” These former schoolhouses read like three-dimensional Rorschach inkblot tests onto which the viewer can project a variety of scenarios, some personal, some historical, and some imaginative.

Another, more recent facet of her photographic oeuvre is Schoenfeld’s schoolbook arrangements which have their origins in her earlier Illusory Arrangements (1973-1976), Rhythmic Arrangements (1976-1981), and Fractures and Severances (1981-1983).

As with the earlier projects, Schoenfeld selects and organizes a variety of objects, this time collected from these former schools. She finds or is given antique illustrated schoolbooks, spelling puzzles, reading scrolls, music charts, slate boards, graduation and achievement certificates, announcements, and old class photographs, among others. These are then carefully arranged and photographed. Sometimes complex and sometimes simple, they are documented evidence of aids to learning. For example,

Spelling Puzzle on Slate (2010) is simple and especially notable as the duck puzzle and board appear to float within the surrounding black void. These arrangements become object poems.

Some of the ghost schools exist only in these photographs as they have been subsequently demolished or accidentally burned. For example, from 1997 to 2006 Schoenfeld extensively photographed the York Log Schoolhouse which was built in 1842 in Burke County, North Carolina. Two months after her last visit it accidentally caught fire, destroying all but the chestnut log walls. It had been a museum of schoolhouse objects - hand-hewn tables and benches, oil lamps, chairs, textbooks, and rare teaching scrolls.

Not only is the one-room schoolhouse experience quickly fading from memory, the schoolhouses themselves are disappearing from the American landscape. It is photographs that preserve the schoolhouses, and as with nineteenth century daguerreotypes, the photographs serve as our contemporary “mirrors with a memory.”

The one-room schoolhouses served a variety of purposes. Paul Milliron, the eldest son in Ivan Doig’s novel, The Whistling Season (2006), attended a oneroom schoolhouse in Marias Coulee, Montana in 1909. By the 1950s, Milliron has become the Montana State Superintendent of Schools and is confronted with the fate of these schools.

Paul reflects that closing them will destroy the rural communities. “No schoolhouse to send their children to. No schoolhouse for a Saturday night dance. No schoolhouse for election day; for the Grange meeting; for the 4-H club; for the quilting bee; for the pinochle tournament; for the reading group, for any of the gatherings that are the bloodstream of community.”

One room schoolhouses were the nucleus of America’s predominantly rural areas. In 1919 there were 190,000 one-room schoolhouses. Today, there are less than 400 that are still active. And one hundred of these schools are in Montana.

When Diana Schoenfeld first spotted Humboldt County’s Eel River Schoolhouse, and later carried her tripod and camera and set them down on the selected spot before vanishing beneath the black cloth to compose, focus the lens, and click the shutter, she had no inkling of the enormous project facing her over the next sixteen years. What artist could?

However, through her patience, persistence, discipline and creativity, the Schoolhouse Odyssey emerged as her photographs emerge out of her darkroom chemicals. As documents they inform us, but as poetry they enchant and elevate our souls.

Darwin Marable, Ph.D.
History of Photography
2011