I started shooting before breakfast, roaming around the empty campus. We finished the day in a dorm building located a stone’s throw from Lake Michigan, at 10:30 at night. In the last two days I have shot over 2000 images, and we have one more full day ahead of us. I’m having the time of my life.
This is another college viewbook assignment, this time for the University of Chicago. Yesterday morning the day dawned brilliant and cloudless, with that midwestern sunlight unlike anywhere else I know, a glinting and incisive light unmodified by ocean air. After breakfast it was overcast with a harsh, winter wind blowing, so I feel fortunate to have wandered about first thing.
I have a posse this time, a writer and an account exec from the agency. They are easy people to travel with, and they take my mind off of scheduling and navigation. I’ve made one of them my sherpa. It means I still have little clue of where I am, but that might be the fact no matter what. They trust my eye, and I wander off leash wherever I am set loose.
The feeling of the campus is very different than Whitman. It’s an urban environment for one, and a large campus with layers of hushed tradition imbued in the very stones of the buildings. A frisbee would seem seriously out of place here, much less a juggler on unicycle (not an uncommon Whitman sight actually). Students earnestly work out problems in groups in the cavernous student union hall, or study alone beneath paintings of university notables under a high, vaulted ceiling. Graduate students outnumber undergrads about four to one, which contributes to the seriousness of the atmosphere. Everyone I’ve talked too is very pleased to be here, though they admit it is not for everyone.
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