She decided to photograph kids instead.
She was nannying for the four children of her high school track coach, including young twin girls, who became her focus. She wondered, "Can you objectify someone if the picture's made out of love?"
Betsy Schneider
The Box
Jamie Peachey
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The answer: "Yeah, of course, but it's more complicated."
The twins got their hair cut super-short, and Schneider took a photo of them, at 9, with their shirts off. "Even that felt risky to me," she remembers.
School over, again, she retreated, moving to Prague for a year. She drank beer, wrote in her journal, took maybe 10 rolls of film. Back in Chicago, she tried working as a photo assistant, but hated the technical end.
Then someone mentioned Sally Mann. Mann's career had exploded — she'd been a photographer for quite a while, but it was the ethereal black-and-white images she took of her children that caught the art world's eye. Schneider saw a profile of Mann in the New York Times Magazine.
"I looked at it and said, that's who I want to work for."
She wrote a letter and included some images she'd been working on. Mann wrote her back, on the backside of a print. Not long after, Schneider moved to Lexington, Virginia, to live with Mann and her family.
The Manns were fascinating. They ate ketchup on everything and didn't take a lot of showers. But they threw fancy parties and otherwise blurred the lines between the upper and lower classes, Schneider recalls. She ran with Mann in the morning and read to her kids at night. She pulled weeds, but so did her boss, who also sought her advice about which of her images worked.
"I was a little Sally. There were amazing, amazing parts of it," Schneider says, looking almost 20 years later as though she still can't believe the opportunity came her way. "To this day, she's in my head."
The two remain in touch, though sporadically. A trip to the Grand Canyon earlier this summer fell through. Mann did not respond to an e-mailed request for an interview for this story.
"I adore her. She's complicated. She knows she's complicated," Schneider says. "She can be a pain in the ass."
At the end of a year and a half with Mann, Schneider admits, "I was losing myself."
She left Virginia for Northern California — specifically, Mills College. Ironically, since she'd eschewed the notion in Chicago, Schneider had been taking self-portraits while working for Mann. (After all, as she explains, it wasn't like she could build a body of work by shooting Mann's children; and there wasn't much else in the small town.)
The idea was to be subversive — to take unflattering close-ups of odd angles. She tried to make herself look ugly, to step away, to see the body as an object.
Schneider pulls at her lip. You know, she says, "like when your mouth is numb with Novocain. How weird it is that you're a thing."
In the end, she ditched the self-portraits for intensely close-up shots of the inside of the mouth. The results are freaky landscapes — you'd never know you were looking at a tongue or the inside of a cheek. Her model was a music major named Frank Ekeberg, who lived in her dorm.
The two fell in love. They graduated, and moved to London so Ekeberg could work on his Ph.D. in electronic composition. Schneider was pregnant.
She was making her best work, ever, and she was going to be a mother.
"I thought I was the king of the world," she says.
Admittedly, London was a letdown. Years later she'd get teaching gigs, but at the time she arrived, Schneider was aimless, and her belly was growing. She missed Mills. An acquaintance warned her to make friends before the baby came, so she found some lectures to attend. It was good advice. She met another expectant mother who, years later, curated the show that caused so much controversy.
First, though, Schneider had Madeleine and launched the "Photo of the Day" project.
Ekeberg, whom Schneider describes as "my pretty much perfect husband," was supportive from the start.
"I wasn't sure if we would have the discipline to keep it going for very long, but once it became part of the daily routine, there was never a right moment to stop," he says now. "The little bit of doubt I had in the beginning was purely practical, I didn't have any problems with the artistic idea behind it. I saw it as a long-term work, where it would possibly take years before we would know whether it was interesting enough to present in any way at all as an art work. In the beginning, it was just a cool thing to have a picture from every day of my child's life."
Schneider and family lived in London for four years, then moved to Norway, where Ekeberg was born and raised. She loved the small town where they lived — particularly Madeleine's pre-school, an idyllic setting with wood-paneled walls and the aroma of waffles. The kids skied in winter and ran around naked in the summer.
