Fifteen years ago, Madison Emond may have been sitting in one of the auditorium chairs, looking up towards the stage, and wondering “What, exactly, is a pin-hole camera?”

But now, following high school and college and a year working in New Zealand on a Fulbright Scholarship, it is Emond who is standing on the stage inside the Barrington Middle School auditorium, looking out into a sea of seventh-graders’ faces, and wondering “Do any of these students understand what I’m trying to explain?”

Toward the end of the school year, Emond enjoyed the unique experience of revisiting her former middle school Orange cluster to share the story of her path leading to the Fulbright Scholarship and her year-long stay in New Zealand.

Emond’s scholarship focused on her photography project "Nature as Artist: Visualizing the Personhood of the New Zealand Landscape." As she told the Orange cluster students, she created an environment in which nature was able to take photographs of itself through the use of photosensitive material.

Orange cluster teachers Peter Blasi and Karen Watson invited Emond back to the middle school to share her experiences with students. The presentation complements the district’s work helping students prepare themselves to be college- and career-ready. 

“You never know the impact you can have, especially a success story,” Blasi said shortly after the presentation. “It might not even be photography, but (it might be) the idea of finding your passion, following it and then letting that grow.

“Opportunity favors the prepared. You have to be ready. When you get a chance, be ready.”

Emond jumped at the opportunity to share her story with the students. 

“I think I would have loved to meet someone who was thinking about the things that I’m thinking about now at that age,” she said. “It’s so meaningful to me to think about who I was when I was in seventh grade, and to think about how I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew I was a creative person. I knew that art made me happy. But I never dreamed that my life would become what it is now. I didn’t plan it, and it’s just a total privilege to be living this beautiful, expansive, adventurous life.”

Emond opened her presentation with a look back at her life in the Orange cluster. She shared a slide show featuring photos of her with friends at the school. Emond told the students that initially she struggled to fit in at school, but eventually built a strong network of friends — some of those people featured in the photos are still her close friends today. 

Emond went to Bard College and flourished in photography. A previous article in the Barrington Times describes Emond’s unique approach: The former Barrington High School graduate would carry large pieces of photosensitive paper to the banks of a river at night and then wade out into the water. She would hold the paper afloat on the water and let the moonlight gradually expose the paper, creating an image. In the wintertime she would follow the same process, except she would pull the paper under the ice covering the river. “The resulting images are objects that the river can effectively speak through directly to viewers, alerting each person to the river’s vitality, agency and creative subjectivity," she said.

During her recent visit to Barrington Middle School Emond explained to the students how her undergraduate focus led to the Fulbright Scholarship. She told Orange cluster students how she moved to New Zealand for a year — after a delay caused by the pandemic — and began her work allowing nature to photograph itself. She described how she used dirt and mud and sticks to build pin-hole cameras. She showed the images captured by that process. 

Emond loved sharing her story with the group of students, which include two of her siblings.

“It was incredibly special,” she said. “I feel like it’s hard for me to talk about what I do sometimes. On a day to day level. So to have these opportunities where I really get to dive into the details of this process with them and with their peers is so, so meaningful to me. It helps us to better understand each other. It’s really cool. I’m so happy to be here.”

Following the event, Emond discussed why speaking engagements like the one at BMS are so important to her. 

“I do what I do because I think we need a new relationship to the natural world,” Emond said. “So to have this opportunity — and another opportunity before this, up in Maine — to work with young people and talk about this alternative relationship that’s possible for us to have with the natural world feels like the whole point of why I do what I do. 

“So, yeah, to have the opportunity to share this with the younger generation is really amazing and super cool, and really rewarding. Because it’s vulnerable for me. I didn’t know how they were going to respond to this and the response was overwhelmingly positive and it just gives me a lot of hope.”

Lots of questions

The Orange cluster students had plenty of questions for Emond following her presentation:

• Were there a lot of spiders in New Zealand? (Not too many.)

• Is it hard to travel? (Yes, how much do you want to invest in a place where you’ll live for only one year?)

• Is she the only person who does photography like this? (There are a few others who doing similar things, but not that do it exactly like Emond.)

• Do you have pictures of the glow worms? (Yes. Emond referenced a special place in New Zealand where there are bioluminescent worms.)

• Do you ever take pictures of animals? (Yes. She also scratched the head of an eel-like fish that lives in New Zealand.)

• Is there a reason the photos had to be in the river? (She was mostly curious about New Zealand granting legal personhood to landforms.)

• Can I make one of those natural cameras at home? (Yes, and you can make one with a shoebox.)