But Schneider had her sights set on a university job. So she sent out résumés and heard back from Arizona State University. After looking over the faculty's work, Schneider wondered if her résumé had become stuck to the back of someone else's; what she did was so different.
That's what the ASU art faculty liked about her. Mark Klett, Regents professor of photography at the Herberger College of Art at ASU, and a noted fine art photographer in his own right, remembers Schneider's interview. He recalls that he and others admired her work, but equally important, they liked her as a person.
Betsy Schneider
Madeleine poses for the "Photo of the Day," June 17, 2008.
Betsy Schneider
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Viktor was a newborn; Schneider recalls getting off the plane in August, wearing a sweater — and a baby.
"She brought the kid with her to the interview, which I thought was really gutsy," Klett says. (Actually, Schneider says, she even breastfed at the interview.)
"She is very upfront, and she kind of wears her opinions and her heart on her shirtsleeve," Klett continues. "She's not hiding anything, and she doesn't play politics or anything, which is really great in a university setting."
He concludes: "She's sort of always questioning herself, which sounds like she's second-guessing herself . . . That's wrong."
Schneider got the job, and moved her family to Arizona.
When she got here, all Schneider knew about the state was that it's hot, and it's the place that didn't want a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
The ASU photography department was — and is — small (five members then, six now), and it was hard to build a community.
Here, she says, "things are more complicated; people are more complicated."
She has made friends. "I tend to bond with people who are struggling with being here," she says.
The worst part of that is that those are often the people who leave town.
Having kids helped. Schneider coaches both kids' soccer teams. She did the photos for their school yearbook. Now, she admits, she's addicted to the sun.
Her studio is a small room tucked behind the Ekeberg/Schneider home — a modest slump-block on a quiet Tempe street. Inside, it feels a little foreign, starker and brighter than your typical American home. The floors are shiny concrete, the walls plain white. There are Moosewood cookbooks in the kitchen and photographs by Schneider and her students everywhere.
In the studio, a wall A/C unit hums loudly, to keep up with the early June heat. It pretty much looks like how you'd expect a photographer's studio to look: Rubbermaids waiting to be filled with negatives, framed prints spilling onto the floor, fancy computers used to process work. (Though Schneider still prefers film for most projects.)
On the walls, she's tacked single images of the kids — some naked, some clothed. Some are straightforward; others tell a story, whether Schneider means to or not. Unlike Sally Mann, she tends to let images happen, rather than giving the kids props and setting scenes.
In the most striking image, a 4-year-old Viktor has appeared in a doorway at home, wearing nothing but a large policeman's hat cocked jauntily to the side. He's carrying a "gun" made of Lego blocks and staring at the camera. To the side, you see Schneider's reflection as she crouches to take the picture.
Huge rolls with the multiple daily photo images lined up are tucked in a corner.
Madeleine is off somewhere else today, but Viktor's chosen to stay home, and the 6-year-old is aimless — ping-ponging between Mom and Dad, both of whom are trying to get some work done. (Soon, Schneider will take off with the kids for the better part of the summer, on an annual road trip that takes them all across the country.)
Viktor comes to the studio door several times — with a bug sucker, then walkie-talkies. Schneider is gently amused.
Where Madeleine has always been compliant about the daily photo, Viktor's ambivalent at best. At 4, he quit. It was a relief to Schneider, who had been running interference daily — the kids would fight over who would pose first. But today, Viktor's all about photography. He wants to be in the studio. Schneider kindly shoos him away, and keeps talking. She's trying to explain how she came to make her work about her kids. Even back in grad school, she says, she thought about how to make art out of the experience of motherhood. "I know that sounds crass," she says, laughing.
But it's really not, if you look at the body of Schneider's work. Even back in grad school, she was concerned with how time affected living things. She did a gorgeous series of photographs of rotting fruit. She's long been influenced not only by Sally Mann but documentarians like Nicholas Nixon, who for 30 years took an annual photograph of his wife and her three sisters.
"You look at that and think, life is short and it happens to everyone," she says.
She thought about photographing a new baby every hour for the first year.
At this point, Viktor bursts in again, this time with a blue plastic camera.
