Culture Feature: NU's Candid Cameraman

A brief stroll through Northwestern's undergraduate admission Web site or the glossy pages of a brochure paint an image of perpetual smiles, fleeting Chicago springtime and effortlessly diverse groups of students' lounging on the Lakefill together. This is not uncalled for. Like every other school of its caliber, NU has to compete for prospective students' cash and brains. But does NU bend the truth beyond passable exaggeration? When you look through publications meant to give high schoolers a peek of our campus, do you see NU, or some ideal invented by the administration?

Joe Gaylor is the photographer NU's admissions department hires to take upwards of 4,000 pictures of students during a two- or three-week period. Gaylor typically shoots in the fall and spring, he says, since officials don't want pictures of the frigid wintertime even though "it's the reality of life at NU." He's been in the "National Geographic for college campuses" business for five years, and works for about 50 universities every year. Gaylor says that although he emphasizes real students in real situations, admissions committees are given free rein to pick and choose which shots will appear on brochures and on the university's Web site. "Other companies stage their shoots. You know, get a white kid, an Asian kid, a black kid and a Hispanic kid and stick them together," he says. "We don't fake anything."

Gaylor explains that the admissions department gives him a "wish list" of shots that they need - certain parts of campus or themes that they don't have in their photo stockpiles. This year, NU asked for engineering students and outdoor photos, the latter of which was complicated by a rainy second day of shooting. Gaylor then shoots and returns his photographs on an external hard drive a few weeks afterward. Gaylor has worked for American universities nationwide, including the University of Miami and Illinois Wesleyan University, as well as several in the UK. "Sometimes when I go on the school's Web site or look at their brochures, I'm frightened," he says. "You've got to be politically correct, I guess. I mean, NU isn't a very diverse school, so there's this push for a certain image that may or may not be the reality. There are a lot of photos on my Web site that I know schools will never use because the girls aren't good-looking enough or the guys are too fat or something."

Mike Mills, NU's associate provost, will receive Gaylor's hard drive and scroll through the photos with a few other admissions employees. Mills says that some of the "glitzy publications" that universities produce don't accurately represent the student body, though NU is not among them. In 2000, University of Wisconsin at Madison digitally altered a white student's face on an admissions brochure to make the student black. A similar situation also occurred at the University of Idaho in 1997 involving photos of two white students. Idaho removed nine photos from the Web site shortly after the fraud was discovered. "There are some schools that over represent certain demographics," Mills says, "but I don't think we're one of them. We have specialty pamphlets for certain things, but the general ones are balanced, I think."

A search of the NU undergraduate admissions Web site reavealed that about 60 percent of the photographs of students are of ethnic minorities, a grossly higher percentage than the actual enrollment numbers. Mills says that he and his colleagues just look for "really great and compelling photos," not certain types of students.

In respect to permission, Gaylor says 95 percent of the schools he works with use a blanket consent system, where freshmen give permission to use their image in university publications when they register for classes. NU uses "model release forms" - waivers that NU tour guides help hand out to the students Gaylor photographed only if they're in a close-up, solo shot. Photos with more than two students don't require releases. He says it's difficult to get everyone to sign, and that, "We photographed at a law school once, and we happened to be in a class where the professor was a copyright lawyer.... He said they're actually useless, legally."

Weinberg sophomore Kate Sheridan is a tour guide who led Gaylor and his crew around campus for a few hours. "I was excited about being in the pictures," Sheridan says. The photos were mostly natural, such as when she ran into friends, whom Gaylor photographed. Only once was a photo actually staged, Sheridan says. She and a Ford building administrative employee pretended to be a professor and student. "They needed engineering pictures."

One of the friends Sheridan ran into is Emily Wright, a Communication sophomore. "I got a little camera happy," Wright says. "I didn't sign a release, but I wouldn't care if they used my photo in something for admissions. I'm in theater, so I'm used to being photographed." Getting signed forms from every student during busy periods when many students were rushing to class, during which Gaylor took many photos, was incredibly difficult, Sheridan says.

Despite his insistence on real photos, Gaylor says many of the schools he works for are likely to overemphasize diversity when they scroll through his prints. "When I take photos in a diverse crowd, people come up to me and say 'Oh, I'm the token black kid.' People think we stage things, which I definitely don't do - we take real photos," he says. "I think universities are overcompensating for a lack of diversity in many cases, and it's a sad story."