One Room School House

In early spring 1976, a small group of Western Kentucky University photojournalism students loaded their cameras and headed into the mountains of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Their assignment was simple but ambitious: document the fading presence of one-room schoolhouses. The trip was born from a belief that the craft of documentary photography could not be fully learned within classroom walls but had to be practiced in the field, among real people and places. Though no one yet called it the Mountain Workshops, this journey marked the moment the idea first took shape, laying the foundation for a lasting tradition in visual storytelling.