Haystack first set up in tiny Liberty, Maine, in the shadow of Haystack Mountain, before relocating a little more than a decade later to its permanent home on Deer Isle. Buoyed by the optimism of the postwar years, the school imagined a loose, collaborative approach to learning in the embrace of natural wonder. Its crafty seminars cross-pollinated with poetry readings, music, and philosophy lectures. It surely sounds like paradise, and the floor-to-ceiling photographs here back it up: An instructor lecturing to a group of students lolling on a wooden deck overlooking the ocean, an array of tapestries pinned to a canvas amid a grove of mature spruce, a lively conversation taking place in a woodsy studio, underneath a pergola with sunlight streaming through.

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