INSPIRATION / PHOTOGRAPHY & COMMUNITY MEMORY
Peter Schreyer
The history was
already in the shoebox.
He helped make a place for the photographs, the people who kept them and the stories only they could tell.
By Rob Urban
In 2001, Peter Schreyer and Winter Park Community Center director Ron Moore had a conversation about family photographs. Schreyer had seen a presentation on a Los Angeles County Library project collecting photographs and oral histories. Moore knew where much of his own community’s history was kept: in shoeboxes under residents’ beds.
That observation helped set a project in motion. The Hannibal Square Heritage Center’s founding account traces the conversation through a successful grant, the first Heritage Day in March 2002, and the collection’s eventual need for a permanent home. Residents brought photographs and stories. The material was already there; the project created a way to gather it, preserve it, and share it.
Schreyer, a photographer born and educated in Switzerland, had become deeply interested in the communities of his adopted country. In Winter Park, that interest joined the knowledge and determination of people who had lived the history. The result was a place where the city’s African American community could be represented through its own family memories, voices, and images.
What a changing
place asks us to notice.
Crealdé’s account of Schreyer’s documentary work describes a Swiss American photographer whose attention has moved between Central Florida communities, Switzerland and New Mexico. His photographs give particular attention to places and people that could otherwise be overlooked.
A photograph can hold more than one truth at a time. A building may be worn and significant. A neighborhood may need investment while also possessing a history that deserves respect. Documentary work becomes more useful when it allows those facts to occupy the same frame.
Schreyer led Crealdé School of Art as executive director from 1995 through 2024. He also taught photography, with a commitment to film and darkroom practice. His black-and-white work has appeared in exhibitions in the United States and Switzerland. The teaching and the documentary projects are closely connected: both involve deciding what to notice, then giving that attention a form someone else can understand.
The picture.
Its keeper.
The story.
The Heritage Center opened in 2007 through a partnership involving Crealdé, Hannibal Square residents, and the City of Winter Park. Its permanent collection explains a particularly thoughtful method of presentation. Family photographs were reproduced as archival prints, paired with a contemporary portrait of the resident sharing them, and accompanied by text drawn from an oral-history interview.
The arrangement gives an old photograph company. The viewer can encounter the original moment, the person remembering it, and the account that helps explain its meaning. A caption naming a street and a year can establish where and when. A resident’s story can tell us why someone cared.
I admire the care in letting a resident remain present beside the history they have shared. The photograph has a keeper, someone who can help us understand what it means. That is a generous way to build a collection. It reminds a visitor that expertise may belong to the person who has quietly kept a family’s pictures safe for forty years.
Memory has
more than one author.
The Sage Project continued that attention to memory through portraits and oral histories of elders. Schreyer worked with chief historian Fairolyn Livingston and historian and docent Mary Daniels. Their respective contributions matter: the finished work combines photographic judgment with historical knowledge and relationships within the community.
The center also places local events alongside the wider history of African Americans. That context helps resist the tendency to treat a neighborhood’s past as a set of charming anecdotes. The people in family photographs lived within public circumstances as well as private ones. Their memories can illuminate both.
The Heritage Center remains free to visit. That access is part of the achievement. An archive gains another kind of value when the community whose history it holds can readily walk through the door.
Two pictures
that belonged
in the record.
In Lindy T. Shepherd’s 2004 reporting for Orlando Weekly, Schreyer described finding two photographs of a man remembered locally for his mule and wagon. People knew him, and newspapers had written about him, yet his picture had been missing from the archives.
That small recovery stays with me. A community can remember somebody vividly while its public record barely shows his face. Family photographs can fill that absence. Looking for them is a way of taking people’s memories seriously enough to follow where they lead.
The first exhibition
belongs at home.
Schreyer’s documentary practice has also included teaching teenagers to examine their own surroundings. Crealdé’s Storytellers program combines photography and oral history in a ten-week class. Finished work is first exhibited in the students’ home community and can then travel as part of the school’s collection.
One installment brought him to New Smyrna Beach’s historic west side in partnership with the Mary S. Harrell Black Heritage Museum. Students learned visual and narrative storytelling through film photography and conversations about their community. The museum’s board chair credited his instruction and mentoring in an account published by Crealdé.
The order of exhibition is a good detail: home first. The people who helped make the work and the neighbors represented in it get to encounter the result before it becomes a story told elsewhere. The students become authors of a public record, rather than simply subjects selected by a visiting adult.
Learning to photograph a familiar place can be surprisingly demanding. Familiarity encourages shortcuts. You know what the building is, so you may stop seeing its details. You recognize a neighbor, so you may assume you know the story. A documentary assignment asks for another look and another question.
A lake seen
from several
directions.
Schreyer has applied that collaborative approach across a wider landscape too. The Lake, produced with the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation, brought together documentary photographers and painters to explore Lake Apopka’s land, people, and history. Its exhibition included forty-five archival black-and-white photographs, oral histories, and ten paintings made outdoors. After its Winter Park debut, it appeared at three Winter Garden locations.
Using several forms allowed the project to approach the lake from different directions. A painting, a photograph, and a remembered experience make different kinds of records. Together they can suggest how much remains outside any one view.
The next pair of hands.
His exhibition Small Stories From a Big Country, on view from September 2025 through January 2026, brought four decades of photographs together. Its subjects reached from Central Florida to Switzerland and New Mexico. All were made with film cameras and printed by hand as archival silver-gelatin photographs in his Crealdé darkroom. The continuity of that process is part of the appeal: different places, different lives, and a photographer still willing to spend time developing the image rather than hurrying past it.
In 2026, Crealdé established a photography scholarship in Schreyer’s honor. The annual award supports an emerging adult photographer with financial need, helping pay for classes and workshops. It is a fitting continuation of a career in which making photographs and helping others make them have been intertwined.
A shoebox can keep a photograph safe for years. Bringing the photograph into a shared record gives its story another chance to be heard.
About Peter Schreyer and the Heritage Center
Who is Peter Schreyer?
Peter Schreyer is a Swiss American documentary photographer and educator. He led Crealdé School of Art from 1995 through 2024 and helped establish the Hannibal Square Heritage Center in Winter Park.
What does the Hannibal Square Heritage Center preserve?
The center preserves photographs, oral histories and other records of Winter Park’s historic African American community. Its Heritage Collection pairs family photographs with portraits of the people sharing them and text from their oral histories.
Is the Hannibal Square Heritage Center free to visit?
Yes. The Heritage Center states that it is free and open to the public. Check its website for current visiting hours and tour information.
Sources: the Hannibal Square Heritage Center’s founding history and collection descriptions; Crealdé’s exhibition, program and scholarship pages; Atlantic Center for the Arts; Volusia County’s artist record; and Lindy T. Shepherd’s 2004 Orlando Weekly reporting. Reflections on photographs, authorship and memory are Rob Urban’s.
For more of Rob’s writing and approach to consulting, meet Rob.