Today, cameras flood Harvard’s campus. Whether it’s with a passerby’s iPhone, a tourist’s DSLR, or an Indyite’s newfound vintage 35mm camera, we constantly capture moments with the flick of a shutter. In 1969 when one of the founders of the Independent, Jim Vassef ’71, was photographing Harvard and its community, the making and sharing images was a special process, nothing like the ubiquity it has become today.
Ever since the first daguerreotypes, there have been and will always be people who love making images with whatever tool they have on-hand and wherever they find something that catches their eye. Some might call it obsessive, but to photographers, image-makers, like Jim and me, it’s our natural way of processing and moving through this world.
In this series, I paired my own images with those of Jim Vassef, one of the Independent‘s founders, and displayed them on a contact sheet. Jim’s photographs utilize black and white analog format while mine use both analog and digital, black and white and color. We both took photographs around Harvard’s campus, Harvard Square, and Boston, and many images may feature similar places or events. However, because of the jump in time, the photographs offer stark comparisons of what the world looked like then and what it looks like now.
Notice iPhones instead of newspapers (images 18 & 24), new popularized styles of fashion and building designs, and masks as a mark of the global pandemic where there was not one before. I still see some of the same expressions, gestures, and gatherings. The people who inhabit these images and spaces, decades apart, cultivate life and energy. They are not only the reason many of us yearn to return to Cambridge, but also the reason we, who are here, now notice a certain emptiness while the larger campus community remains far away.
Rivers Sheehan ’23 (rivers_sheehan@college.harvard.edu) sees the world in technicolor.