Story-Catching from the Landscape of Memory

By Diana Schoenfeld

A primary source of this ongoing project lies in my girlhood memories of an old landscape called the Deep South. I knew it before the bulldozers and tractor blades of development destroyed so much physical evidence of the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, the countryside of Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas was rich with picturesque old buildings representing layers of forgotten history. I enjoyed the organic co-mingling of architecture with the natural world. During hot, humid summers, plants like kudzu, honeysuckle, and poison ivy would overtake acres of landscape and isolated old buildings were often engulfed in lush, leafy growth.

It was this particular American environment that permeated my imagination until 1973 when I left Georgia for New Mexico, finding there a land arrayed in timeless adobe buildings – a sculptural architecture defined by intense sunlight and shadow.

I began photographing one-room schoolhouses in 1995 while traveling to teach in different parts of the country. Twenty years later, I continue to explore the ghost school subject, most recently returning to do so in New Mexico. There, one remote schoolhouse, built in 1890, is still graced with its tall wooden bell tower. It stands in proud abandonment, isolated in the expansive fields of that state’s southwestern hills.

Elsewhere, two others are constructed of terrone – sod bricks cut from the river bottom of the Rio Grande. Farther north, a narrow, pitted rock-strewn road leads precariously uphill to the ghost town of Silver City, Idaho. The treacherous drive is worth it, for there stands a stunning 1892 schoolhouse, white walls radiant in sunlight.

This photographic work was undertaken in the spirit of curiosity and adventure, linked as much to my love of the literature of frontier America as to photography, and remains so to this day. What I had not anticipated is becoming a story-catcher in the process. People everywhere were eager to help me find abandoned schools I inquired about – but they also yearned for participation in their personal life stories where reside decades of memory related to vanished schoolhouses. I provided the perfect listener and thus began two decades of filling notebooks, audiotapes, and scraps of paper with these many voices.

When I began searching for ghost schools I had not imagined listening to and preserving oral story, nor creating an anthology of thematically related literature, nor creating still life compositions with antique schoolbooks. I imagined old buildings representing isolation, loneliness, and solitude showing fading resilience to the forces of time and exposure. But in receiving the spontaneous verbal gifts of strangers, I began to recognize this as a form of old-fashioned nourishment that is vanishing along with the schools.

Schooldays-related stories – especially from the distant past – be they literary or conversational or expressed in personal letters - create a bridge between people of all ages, languages, and circumstances, especially between the extremely old and the very young. The old need to tell their tales and the young need to ask their urgent questions:

“Since LASSIE’S died, who’s going to save that old log schoolhouse AGAIN?” “In the old days, was everything black and white?” “How do you FIND them? Is this one really haunted? How can you tell? Are they scary?”

In exhibition, some thirty transcribed memoirs are placed on pedestals in front of the photographs where they are intended to be picked up, handled, and read, as were the old schoolbooks on view in the display cases. People thrive on sharing forgotten stories, rediscovering abandoned places in their lives, and experiencing the treasure of leisurely remembering, especially with strangers in the context of a larger, familiar, collective story: everyone’s youthful schooldays.

While the physical subject of old schoolhouses nourishes the eye, and provides the tangible, cultural anchor to this project, it is the stories - from antique schoolbooks and other literature, to spontaneous, emotive, living expression - caught, found, saved, and interspersed with the photographs - that animate this journey and its public presentation.

Years passed before I realized that on a deeper level, my personal schoolhouse odyssey has been more than a pictorial study of old schoolhouses. It has been a search for, and a way to recover, a lost landscape of home - in the field of physical geography where old schoolhouses yet stand - and in the far reaching landscape of memory as well.