Those who want to see Hallmark School of Photography’s legacy continue in Turners Falls saw a glimmer of hope last week.
A 1987 graduate of the private, post-graduate photo school who went on to a successful career in New York City heard that his alma mater was closing this fall and thinks he may have the professional chops and enthusiasm, if not the money, to revive Hallmark.
Bill Diodato left Turners Falls for New York and parlayed his Hallmark training into an established career there. On his website, billdiodato.com, there’s a long list of big-name clients, including Victoria’s Secret, Avon, Men’s Health Magazine and Nike. Now, at age 49, he thinks returning to Hallmark could be the next phase of his career. Diodato told The Recorder if can find the right partners, and if he can negotiate the right price, he would be willing to try to revive the 41-year-old school. That’s a big “if.”
Will Bast, a spokesman for Premier Education Group, the for-profit vocational education company that bought Hallmark in 2009 but is now closing it, confirmed that the school’s 241 Millers Falls Road property is being listed as two separate lots, with a total asking price of roughly $2.5 million. The school’s approximately 37,000-square-foot education center, on just over 6 acres of land, is listed at $1.75 million. The 11,686-square-foot administration building, on about 3 acres, is listed at $800,000.
Diodato said to keep costs low, he’d be interested only in purchasing the education center.
One potential partner, one with management experience at the school, but not deep pockets, is Ed Martin, a former Hallmark president and executive director.
“I’d love to see the school continue, and he’d be a great person to run it,” Martin said of Diodato.
While Diodato’s intentions come as good news for many Hallmark alumni who have expressed sadness about the school’s impending closure, the task is challenging. After finding the money, he’d need to rebuild a staff and reconstitute a program that state regulators would license and that would generate enough profit to satisfy the investors.
Bast asserts that the school is being closed because it wasn’t profitable enough, and he claims the state regulators “don’t want any for-profit schools.”
Those sound like the excuses of an absentee landlord who found the school too much trouble for the return on investment. If Diodato can find financial and educational partners, we would see a different picture: an established alum with a desire to run a school he cares about personally, motivated by a desire to pass on his skills to new generations of would-be professional photographers.
For years, Hallmark’s 10-month, 1,400-hour certificate program, founded and run by a local businessman, was known as a prestigious school for photography education, with speakers that included well-known photographers such as Life Magazine photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Douglas Kirkland. It wasn’t until the founder’s son got into financial and legal trouble that the school was sold to the outside vocational education chain.
We think the local angle could make the difference, so we are happy to see that, despite the odds, Diodato says he intends to move forward.