Seminar Helps Students Understand the Past Through ‘Visual Biographies’

Published: October 9, 2009

For her freshman seminar “Studies in Visual Biography,” Jessica Helfand (left) spends one afternoon each week in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where she shows her students primary materials such as scrapbooks and other ephemera.

New Haven, Conn. — The students who are studying visual biography this semester with School of Art senior critic Jessica Helfand refer to themselves as "Jessica's Girls," a twist on a 1980s pop song called "Jessie's Girl."

There are only six of them, but these women have the distinction of being in the first-ever Yale College freshman seminar at the School of Art, according to Helfand, who affectionately calls the students her "posse."

"We're a tight-knit ‘family' of all girls, who get to know our teacher one-on-one" through the seminar, says Yale College freshman Hana Omiya.

Helfand, an award-winning graphic designer, created "Studies in Visual Biography" to guide students through an exploration of diaries, journals and scrapbooks, focusing on American and British cultural life in the period between the two World Wars. As her students piece together stories about the lives of the people — both famous and otherwise — who documented or chronicled their personal lives using these various media, they are also learning about social history, methods of recording memory and a multitude of artistic techniques and tools ranging from collage to typography.

The Freshman Seminar Program was established five years ago to "strengthen a culture of close intellectual contact between teachers and students in the pre-major years." It has grown from 15 seminars in its first year to more than 40 this year in disciplines ranging from anthropology to electrical engineering to molecular, cellular and developmental biology. Some are yearlong, while others, including the new School of Art seminar, are for a semester only. Other seminar offerings this fall include "Reproductive Technologies," "Search for Extraterrestrial Life," "Urban Ecology of New Haven," "The Viking Age," "Music and Melancholy" and "The Ethics of War," to name just some.

The freshmen in "Studies in Visual Biography" say that they feel privileged to be studying with Helfand, who — as a collector of scrapbooks and author of the acclaimed 2008 book "Scrapbooks: An American ­History" — has come to be known as an authority on the subject. Her book examines the evolution of this form of creative expression from the beginning of the 19th century to the present and features color photographs of more than 200 scrapbooks, some created by private individuals and others by such notables as Zelda Fitzgerald, Hilda Doolittle, Carl Van Vechten, Anne Sexton and Lillian Hellman. It is the first to focus attention on American scrapbooks and the people who made them, as well as their place in American culture.

"Scrapbooks" serves as one of the main texts for the freshmen in her seminar, but Helfand has also been showing them primary sources in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the students meet for one-and-half hours every Monday. There, they have been exploring such material as Langston Hughes' travel journals, various artists' sketchbooks, correspondence between T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and relevant personal ephemera that give students glimpses into the lives of others. On Wednesdays, they spend their time in the studio at the School of Art, where they respond in the pages of their Moleskine® notebooks to what they've seen and engage in a group critique of their work. The sketchbook itself serves as their "moving canvas" and is a sort of personal "diary" of their own experience of the seminar, Helfand says.

"The course is called ‘Studies in Visual Biography' because it's all about introducing the students to primary sources through which they start to acknowledge, observe and identify visual cues, which they then use to decipher, interpret and understand what someone's life might have been," says Helfand. "With their own sketchbooks, which I urge them to keep with them at all times, they are encouraged to start looking at ways of using visual form to express their own experiences."

Helfand became interested in visual biographies as a graduate student at the Yale School of Art, when she came upon the correspondence of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound at the Beinecke Library. "I was so fascinated by the postage stamps and the handwriting that I thought, ‘There's got to be a way to tell a story about their relationship that somehow has this evocative theatrical quality that you get from actually looking at the material," comments Helfand. "What you usually see in biography is a chronological documentation of a person's life, but scrapbooks are much more asynchronous than this."

Her own preference for non-traditional biography, together with her fascination with other people's lives and her passion for graphic design, led her to the previously unexplored realm of scrapbooks, which — with their blend of pictures, words and personal ephemera — are for their makers a sort of a "crude" or "amateur" exercise in graphic design, as well as "a genre rich in emotional, pictorial and sensory detail," Helfand writes in her book.

Her interest in scrapbooks, diaries and journals "would have been laughed at" during her days as a graduate student in the 1980s, when there was a focus only on objective, non-personal art, recalls Helfand. She is thrilled, she says, to have the opportunity to expose her students to visual biography in an intimate, seminar setting today.

During a recent class meeting at the Beinecke Library, her students gathered around as Helfand showed them the pages from the sketchbooks of various noted artists and designers and discussed topics ranging from how photo albums can tell a biographical story to the 1,000 Journals Project (a collective journaling experiment) to how different types of paper respond to ink. While poring over the artists' sketchbooks, Helfand intermittently reminds her students to pay attention to what inspires them and to do something with that excitement: "Whatever catches your attention, you can document in your sketchbook," she urges, following later with "The more you draw in your book, the better you'll be."

She can barely contain her enthusiasm when she comes upon some pages of a sketchbook that are less than neat and orderly.

"I'm drawn to the scrapbooks and sketchbooks that are messy and chaotic, where people draw and use their own typefaces and cross things out," she says. "They are so much more like life itself."

Some of Helfand's students say that they have begun collecting ephemera themselves as a result of the seminar. Freshman Deandra Tan has discovered that she is as fascinated by the scrapbooks, diaries and journals of ordinary people as she is with those who are famous.

"We look at everyday people and try to make a story out their ephemera," she says. "It's interesting to pay so much attention to the details of their lives."

Sally Cho was drawn to the seminar because it combines both art and literature in a study of visual form. Her classmate Sandra Giramahoro, who is a pre-med student, was attracted to the class because it allows her to do something artistic.

Helfand, whose responsibility as a senior critic is to advise graduate students on their thesis projects, says that teaching the freshmen is a new and invigorating experience for her.

"I'm so aware that this class is giving my students what might be their first real contact with a faculty member," she says. "I'm very conscious of their youth, and also that theirs is an intensely computational generation. I want to introduce them to working with actual source material, but I also want to give them a sense of rigor and a kind of discipline of learning. I know in some ways I'm shaking things up for them in a class that is both about making their own work and an intellectual engagement."

Helfand plans to devote one of her upcoming seminars to a discussion of memory based on an examination of the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies at Sterling Memorial Library. She says that for her and for her students, the study of visual biographies can be a "humbling" experience.

"Looking at scrapbooks, we learn all kinds of things about people who were living through real experiences and, sometimes, calamities," Helfand says. "They may have documented their experience of a flood or of the Depression, or the loss of a sibling in the First World War. They might describe how the price of milk went up and they can't afford to buy it for their children.

"Some of the people whose lives we study have written down the simplest of things," she continues. "When you read enough of these simple details from another person's life, you start to have a different perspective. Often, there are surprises as a life unfolds before our eyes, where we see that our assumptions about a person aren't necessarily true. Sometimes, we learn as much about ourselves as we do about the lives of others."

— By Susan Gonzalez

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