Trinity University Special Collections and Archives: student life photographs

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Trinity Then and Now

The following post is by guest blogger Anh-Viet Dinh '15 about his project Trinity: Then and Now. The project is located at http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/dinh1/.

The “Then and Now” project (also titled Portals to the Past) was inspired by a series of photographs found online, where photographers would superimpose their own family pictures onto the current location in the photograph. When I began taking these photographs for my beginning digital photography class in March 2012, they were assigned as a “Visual Poetry” assignment, which required us to tell a story with a series of photographs. I originally wanted to take HDR landscape photos transitioning from day to night, but while thinking about other possible photographs, I ran into the website DearPhotograph.com. This blog features hundreds (probably thousands) of photographs taken by people from all around the world, showing their historical family photographs superimposed onto the present scene. Seeing these photos is what sparked my imagination and helped me develop the idea of taking Trinity University’s historical photographs and incorporating this type of photography.

I remembered seeing photos on one of the school’s servers and went searching for potential photos to use. The only criteria I used to select the photos was if there was a significant change in scenery. The number of photos I could use were limited since many of those I found were taken from the one of the older campuses, in an ambiguous location, or in a helicopter (I’m betting aerial views would be pretty hard to superimpose...). I did eventually find the ones I would use for my very first photos, including the historical photo of the reflection pond, and the photo of cardiac hill.

Not only was I limited in what photos I could use, but my camera was clearly not suited for this type of photography! At the time, I was using a Canon t1i with an 18-55mm. The idea was to be able to have a wide enough view to see how the present scene differs from the past photograph, but with the equipment I was using, I was only able to get a limited view of the scene in one shot. Therefore, with the exception of one photograph, the final pictures that were produced were composed of 3-9 photographs each. The photo of the cactus garden behind Calvert Hall, was composed of 9 vertical pictures stitched together oh Photoshop. This method was necessary in order achieve a wide angle view of the scene, but could be achieved by simply using a wide-angle lens. After critiquing the three initial photographs submitted to my fellow students in class, one of my friends, Jane, insisted that I showed my work to her art history professor, Kathryn O’Rourke, who mentioned that she was working with Amy Roberson from Special Collections on another project and that my project could potentially be incorporated into her first-year class the following fall semester. Dr. O’Rourke forwarded some photos to me from Special Collections and ultimately virtually introduced me to Amy, who guided me through selecting even more photos from Special Collections. When I met Amy in the summer for the first time, I was shown the enormous library of photographs that Amy had, and it blew my mind. I remember when she pulled out a long drawer of cards and told me to go through some of the cards to see if I liked the description of the photos. There must have been tens of thousands of cards for me to choose from! Amy had photos both in the form of reversal film, film negatives, prints, and digital collections. Before working on this project, I had no idea that Special Collections would have the amount of photos it did, let alone the different forms of photos it had. I eventually found a number of potential photographs and finished my project, launching the mini exhibit the following fall semester with the help of Dr. O’Rourke’s students. Overall, I am grateful to have been able to see a small assignment turn into a collaborative project involving so many different people that made this project a success.

We love the pieces that Anh-Viet created using our collections. Thank you!

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Student Days -- Reverend Black at Andover Newton Theological School, 1940s

Here at Trinity University, all anticipate the end of the semester, and student and faculty life is abuzz as projects and papers are due, and seniors wrap up their undergraduate life. The digital collections contain two sets of photographs that represent Reverend Black's own time as a student at Andover Newton Theological Seminary (as it was called in those days) in Newton, Massachusetts, which he attended from 1940 to 1943. The photographs are candid snapshots, primarily of Reverend Black and his fellow students studying, or enjoying leisure time and each others company in their residential dormitory.
Over the years of his life, Reverend Black often remarked that his time at the school was the first time he had ever lived in a non-segregated society. The experience was no doubt similar for other African Americans from the South attending Andover Newton Theological Seminary in the years before desegregation of the South. As is seen in the second photo, Samuel H. James, Jr. was also at the school at the time. He became Reverend S.H. James of the Second Baptist Church in San Antonio, was the first African American elected as councilman to the San Antonio city council, and was a founding civil rights leader in San Antonio in his own right.
Others who went on to become influential ministers also appear in some of the photographs, such as Alfonso Leon Lowry and Edward McCreary. The Trinity Digital Collections provides access to the thesis Reverend Black wrote to gain his degree, Communism as a Religion, made available by kind permission of the Franklin Trask Library at Andover Newton Theological School.