Michael Jacobson-Hardy (1996) photo by Hannah Jacobson-Hardy

Michael Jacobson-Hardy, artist-in-residence at MHC, will deliver a slide presentation, “Photographing in Factories, Schools, and Prisons,” Thursday, November 9, at 7 pm, in Gamble Auditorium. Jacobson-Hardy is noted for his documentary work on social justice and has published two books, Behind the Razor Wire, a collection of images from United States prisons (with an introduction by Angela Davis), and The Changing Landscape of Labor, focusing on American workers. His lecture will address issues of race, class, and gender in social institutions.

The presentation is part of a special campus photography workshop led by Jacobson-Hardy and organized by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. “This project developed in large part in response to President Creighton's initiative to undertake a campus master-planning process,” says Marianne Doezema, art museum director. Jacobson-Hardy's background in documentary photography and his interest in social issues, says Doezema, “broadened and enriched the project from the very beginning. “In fact, Michael sees himself, quite rightly, in the tradition of photographers like Lewis Hine, who also brought students into the landscape—the landscape of Central Park in New York City in the early part of this century—to examine the environment, using the camera as a research tool.”

Under Jacobson-Hardy's guidance, ten Mount Holyoke students are participating in a six-week workshop, learning the basic skills of photography in order to examine the campus through the lens. The project's two primary components consist of making portraits of the campus's living and learning environments, and, in the spring, exhibitions of selected work by Jacobson-Hardy and his students. Jacobson-Hardy will be living and working on campus for the next two weeks.

To date, students have met for four three-hour Friday sessions and have learned darkroom techniques. “They've now had a crash course in the basics,” says Jacobson-Hardy. “Our ultimate aim is to examine the environment of Mount Holyoke as it relates to learning, social life, and the landscape of the campus. We all have our own ideas, which makes it interesting.” Part of the exercise will include writing, he says, and students have already participated in active dialogues about the campus. They have also examined reproductions of images by master photographers. The ten workshop participants—who range from novices to more experienced photographers—were selected from a group of thirty applicants, and have been joined by Christopher Benfey, professor of English and codirector of the Weissman Center for Leadership, who is auditing the workshop.

This is not Jacobson-Hardy's first visit to the campus. In 1994, MHC's art museum featured an exhibition of his work documenting Holyoke schoolchildren. The museum purchased several of his images for the permanent collection at that time. Two years ago, while working in residence at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he met with Doezema and informally discussed the possibility of working with students at MHC.

A self-taught photographer, Jacobson-Hardy has also focused on imagery from the landscape and has been combining photography and social research for the past fifteen years. His successful career behind the camera follows an earlier profession as a nationally recognized guitar maker. In 1987, however, Jacobson-Hardy had a transforming experience. He was commissioned to build an old-style wooden view-box camera with bellows and realized he had discovered an exciting new tool through which he could document the world around him—a world that seemed rife with social injustice.

His subsequent work reflects a deep dedication to exposing that world through photography. He is currently working on books on inner-city schoolchildren with the Child Study Center at Yale University and on social class and race in Washington, D.C., for which Ralph Nader will be writing an introduction. Here on the MHC campus, he will be utilizing his large-format box camera and tripod for the next few weeks. Look carefully, and you may spot him hunched beneath a black hood in pursuit of the many faces of Mount Holyoke.