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Sharing Glimpses Of Decades Of Childhood

Behind The Lens With Marilyn Woods

photo by Photo Provided With curiosity, art and through the lens of her camera, Marilyn Woods has impacted students in three states during her fifty year career. Today, her newest projects link generations through photography, the Internet and communications!

photo by Photo Provided

photo by Photo Provided

photo by Photo Provided

photo by Photo Provided

Tuesday August 11, 2015

By Cookie Steponaitis

Marilyn Woods has been fusing art, education, and touching the lives of children since 1964 in a classroom or outside of school walls while working on special projects. Woods has passed along the lessons she learned from her parents and encouraged books, reading, creativity and the wonder of play. Children who crossed paths with Marilyn Woods were always seeing connections, taking risks and creating while finding out about themselves and their world.
    Woods was born the oldest of a family of four, given her first camera as an eighth grade graduation present, and consciously remembers, “always taking pictures or working with art.”  She, and her siblings were encouraged by their parents and education was always a part of the end goal in her family. While her father never actually graduated high school, his engineering and technical skills with his hands led him to enroll in Brooklyn Tech and some of her earliest memories center around her mother and father being good at making things whether it was furniture, fantastic gardens, or other forms of art. Woods’ parents fostered in all their children a curiosity and wonder about the world around them and to this day art and education is a part of their lives. Woods just retired from a fifty-year career in education, her brother retired as an American Literature professor with a passion for making Shaker Furniture, and her sister was a Textile Artist with pieces in the American Craft Museum.
    Whether it was doing her student teaching in Kansas, working in New Jersey and Virginia as a young teacher with a first grade class, or her career in Addison County involving teaching grades K-12 in art, photography, science and social studies, Woods credits the lessons of her early life as the starting point for her unbreakable bond with art, education and children. And to this day with a camera in hand, Woods’s images leap off the page showcasing children at play, work or in thought and convey to the viewer a sense of place and event, telling a story in an image. While she did not start her own darkroom work until the 1970’s, it was through that work that led Woods to teach high school photography and advise the creation of several years of the school yearbook.
    Woods possesses thousands of images spanning her fifty years in education and has taken to retirement with a passion, finding almost three times as many new projects to do working with children. Woods retired officially in 2013 and spent 2014-2015 in the schools volunteering every day with students helping them make connections through the arts. Whether it was photographing every fifth and sixth grader or beginning the task of reviewing her years of images, Woods finds the photos tell a story even if they are decades old and result in striking up communication and conversation between generations and former classmates. “The Internet is simply amazing as a communication tool,” shared Woods. “I have been posting images of the students over time and see not only comments from prior students but sharing of stories and people connecting now in the present.” Former classmates keep in touch and link their lives as adults like they once did in their adolescence in school.
    Two of Woods’ current new projects involve answering the question of what it was like to be a child in Addison County and the role of the school over time. She uses web tools like Chronicling America through the Library of Congress and is able to read collections of digital newspapers from the region currently focusing on the Middlebury Register starting in 1866. She is learning about parochial schools, political ideology and locations of original buildings and employs Google Maps, Ancestry sites and historical society maps and collections to pinpoint the movements in education both physical and ideological.
     Woods, as her family’s self-appointed historian has used her artistic side as well as investigative spirit to trace her family lineage and stories of homes and families on the road where she lives. Sometimes, for whole afternoons, Woods delves into the, “small things of life that tell so much about how people lived, dreamed and how school tied all of that together.” Woods gave permission to share with the readers that she will be launching a Facebook appeal for any photographs pre-1970 of any area school, students, and activities or gatherings. She has a vision of creating a digital archive of these images and linking them to elementary school students, giving them yet another way to connect to who they are as children, family members and members of our local communities.
    The Valley Voice celebrates the stories captured through the lens of Wood’s camera. Although retired, and not in the classroom, the lens of her camera still catches moments and shows her former students, now parents, how to play and rejoice, fostering in each new group she works with a sense that talking, playing and being imaginative are forever gifts.  “I am so happy that the Internet allows people to connect with each other,” she concluded, “and these new projects are so much fun. They are like solving a mystery, one puzzle piece at a time.”

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