Change: A Portrait of Masterman’s Yearbook

High school yearbooks are, at their core, emblems of change. As hairstyles, fashion, and graphic design styles fade into obscurity, yearbooks take on the role of time capsules.

It seems fitting, then, that the process of creating the publication has had to change, too. This year has seen a rapid transformation of Masterman’s yearbook team in a multitude of ways.

Shirley Zhang (12-4) joined Yearbook Club sophomore year. At the time, there was only one other sophomore involved, and zero freshmen.

“Yearbook is a very small club, generally,” she tells me. “I like a small yearbook, because everyone knows each other and works together closely.”

Shirley got into Yearbook through her sister’s involvement and an interest in photography. The two shared a camera they had at home, which was a step up from the school’s ancient cameras. She recalls returning home after sports games, with hundreds of candids filling the SD card.

New yearbook members start off as photographers, mainly tasked with taking pictures of their own grade.

“Now that I’m a co-editor, a lot has changed,” Shirley says. “I get to choose the layout of the pages, the headers, the text, and the design with the other co-editor.”

Masterman French teacher Madame Copeland’s departure at the end of last year meant the club was bound to go through change; they had lost their sponsor, and had to find a new leader for the club.

“We had Mr. Koller in the beginning of the year, and then we switched to Ms. Elana two weeks ago,” Shirley explains. “It’s been really hard with different teachers coming in. It's just a lot of people and so communication has been difficult.”

Ms. Elana’s arrival as sponsor also came with a crucial change in the makeup of the club.

“Now that we’ve got Miss Elana, she's been asking people in her class to join. Now we have a bigger club, and there's been a lot more recruitment, because usually all the advertising we do is at the club fair in the beginning of the year.”

As one such new recruit, Ellie Zdancewic (10-2) is tasked with taking photos of various classes and extracurriculars this year, which has become complicated as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The usual huddles of classmates and club members have been replaced with the virtual squares of Zoom and Google Meet.

“The pictures are just screenshots, they all look the same. Miss Elana is desperate for candid photos, which you would usually take in the hallways, and you can't really do that virtually.”

Shirley adds that the team had to get a lot of people to send in pictures of themselves. “We collect things via Google Forms, but some people don’t respond. Ms. Elana has been hounding people, but it’s been hard to communicate.”

Despite these challenges, Shirley says she’s enjoyed the creativity and freedom to explore that the new sponsors have brought. One of these new ideas is to commemorate in-person events which never occurred.

“We’re looking to include things about what we’ve missed this year in a spread that we’re calling Pandemic Pages,” Shirley explains. “Seniors didn’t have things like Junior Prom or class trips and it’s important to commemorate those lost opportunities.”

Ellie agrees that Ms. Elana “has been really adamant about wanting evidence we were virtual this year.”

Yearbook meetings are held once a week, and Shirley says that the meeting lengths vary. “Sometimes we stay on for like three hours to do work and discuss stuff,” she mentions.

The club uses a company called Walsworth to design the book, which gives everyone access to page designs. Between Ellie’s attempts to comfort a very loud cat, she describes the average Yearbook meeting.

“We make decisions like, ‘we’re going to put orchestra on one full page, and band on the other page.’ Then we put all the pages in order, and assign people to take pictures.”

The changes to Yearbook will continue. Shirley says that this year, “there’s definitely a lot more student input from everyone, and it's only going to be more in the coming years. We've only been able to change so much this year, especially with it online, but I’m really excited to see what the underclassmen do. I'd like to see them step up to the role.”

Yearbooks can have incredible significance. They commemorate a year in our lives, and can hopefully be looked back on for years to come.

“I look at old pictures of my own all the time,” Ellie recounts. “I like being part of making something that someone could be sentimental about in the future. It’s tradition. Every school has a yearbook. I remember on the last day of eighth grade looking through the yearbook with all my friends. It’s part of the camaraderie, this little memento of a place where we spent all of our time.”

In a year where everything is changing, this yearbook may serve as a sort of historical record – a token of what going through these changes was like, and how we dealt with them.

If you find yourself getting sentimental too, or are just interested in photography and graphic design, Yearbook may be the place for you.