A Day in the Life of Penland School
Photographs by the 2008 Sixth Session Penland Photo ClassThe photographs in this gallery were taken on Friday, August 15, 2008 at Penland School of Crafts. This was the central project of a two-week summer photo workshop. The photographers included six students, a studio assistant, and the instructor (that's me, Robin Dreyer). Five of the students were beginners.
After a four-day crash course in black and white darkroom photography, the eight photographers set out to document one day in the life of Penland School of Crafts, beginning at 6 AM and ending after midnight. Over the weekend, everyone processed film and made contact sheets (and went to the river). On Monday we made selections and started printing. On Thursday at 5 PM we invited the whole school to see our photo essay: 50 photographs, dry mounted, titled, sequenced, and pinned to the wall of the Penland printmaking studio.
This was our list of potential photographic subjects for the day.
It was an exhilarating experience involving long days, late nights, loud music, snacks, and lots of discovery. The day we put up the show produced some of the most elegant group process and division of labor I've ever seen, with some people trimming and mounting the photos, others inventing titles, others preparing the space and figuring out the logistics of getting everything on the wall.
The group was far too lively and inventive to take a strictly journalistic approach to the project. So, along with sharp, beautifully composed documentary photographs, our exhibition included long exposures, blurs, images cropped from other images, prints with extreme tonalities, and a light painting we all did together just before midnight.
With fourteen classes, a 400-acre campus, food service, 50 employees, an evening reception at the resident artist studios, and lots more, we didn't have a chance of recording every aspect of a day at Penland School, but these pictures certainly represent a good sample.
This is our crew at our show. Back row (left to right): Bonnie Barrow, Laurel Buras,
Robin Dreyer, Hadley Perona, Jason McKinney. Front row (left to right): Ellen Denker,
Kate Copeland, Jamie Giesmer
As Penland's communications manager I have been making and looking at photographs of Penland for more than a decade. This collection includes pictures that are as good as any I've seen. There are some that capture aspects of the school I had never noticed, and there are some that look at things in ways that have never occurred to me. That's about as much gratification as a teacher can expect.
I want to thank the participants in this class for creating a memorable learning experience and an excellent document. Special thanks go to our studio assistant Kate Copeland who kept everything running smoothly, to Dana Moore and Tammy Hitchcock who stepped in at the last minute to help us finish the exhibition, and to everyone who let us take their picture.
These galleries retain the sometimes cryptic titles and the approximately chronological sequence we used for the Penland exhibition; the photographer is identified under each photograph.
I hope you enjoy the show.
Robin Dreyer
