Cornell College graduation 1976;  student publication board meeting;  senior portraits

Students at Cornell College got taxed a student activity fee.  It paid for a variety of things, including the student radio station, weekly newspaper, and yearbook.  I was editor of the yearbook my sophomore and senior years.  These photos were taken my sophomore year for the yearbook.  Nearly all of my college photographs were taken with an eye that they might be used in the yearbook. 

The student publication board was an oversight committee of students, administrators, and professors.  It insured that the money was being spent right.  It provided a forum for discussing campus issues and how they related to the media.

One of the traditions of the Cornell yearbook was the senior photograph.  Seniors got to submit a picture of themselves (or something else) that would be published in the yearbook in the senior section.  The yearbook photographers would shoot most but not all of those photographs.  I don’t know how the other photographers handled it, but I didn’t charge for the service.  I wanted a good representation in the yearbook.  I enjoyed meeting people and trying to get the best portrait I could of them.  I was learning.  I’m still learning.  Looking at these particular photographs I wonder why I was so interested then in backlighting.

Graduation is unique.  Each semester increases tempo.  The spring semester builds to the release of the summer.  The senior spring semester builds to graduation.  Four years of a place, a set of people, neighbors, teachers, friends, best friends, all together.  And then gone, forever in the rear view mirror.

The ceremony itself is small town pageantry.  There is a religious convocation preceding the graduation ceremony.  I never went.  The school provides one last buffet dinner for students and guests.  There is a parade of faculty, graduates, and the otherwise honored.  Cornell had a professor give a speech and a student give a speech, elected by the graduating class.  I remember Professor David Weddle’s speech.  He masterfully wove together puns based on the names of his faculty colleagues.  I can remember no other speech from this or any other graduation.

This was my first college graduation.  (Ok.  My second.  I remember going to aunt Nancy Weston’s graduation from Ball State when I was 9 and mom was threatening me for laughing so hard with 12-year-old uncle Jim.)  Among my friends who were seniors I could see in their eyes the mixed emotions of triumph, happiness, and a nostalgia for the moment that they were then living.

One aspect I loved about events drawing parents and students was photographing the interactions.  Seeing the similarities both in resemblance, but also in action.  The same slouch.  The same gestures.  Two, or three, or several individuals becoming one thing, and trying to get a photograph of it.  It was only later, with Hugh Lifson’s help, that I figured out that I was also trying to reproduce that connection in the rectangle of my viewfinder and the rectangle of my photograph.  There is a subtle difference between seeing the patterns and showing them as a complete composition.

The graduation ceremony brought it together and I hoped I was ready to see.