For the past few years, I’ve been working on putting together manuscripts related to various photography projects I have worked on over the years.
I began to publish them here at this blog, beginning last summer, with On Hoosier Gridirons, a non-fiction account of two gifted athletes, Eric Watt and Kyle Ray, who grew up in small towns and attended small high schools and colleges at opposite ends of Indiana.
These young men played quarterback on their school teams, traveling divergent paths in pursuit of excellence and success, never facing each other on the gridiron until their junior years in college. I conveyed their stories by using a dual timeline approach. The timeline led directly to the game in which they finally faced each other.
Next came a picture-dominant series titled Garfield Park … in Pictures, a 40-installment display of my years of photo documentary work of various facets of Garfield Park, a regional park in Indianapolis. This series debuted Feb. 20 of this year and ended more than a month later on April 1.
After that, I did a one-off retrospective of photographs that I took at 17 performances in the Indy Acoustic Cafe Series from 2010 to 2015. By "one-off," I mean that I included six to nine photos from each show that I photographed into a single post here.
These pictures had appeared once previously at the blog, but each show's photos appeared at the time of the show within the aforementioned time frame, so they were spread out at the blog. The anthology I put together this year brought them all together in a single post.
If you've missed any or all of these, and the summaries above somehow pique your interest now, I've provided links for each that can get you started on any of the three (or all of them).
Today, I’m launching another multi-chapter series that longtime visitors to Photo Potpourri should recognize from blog posts that were scattered over a seven-year period, specifically 2009 to 2016. It was for a project I called “Game Day.”
The project took me to 14 small colleges and universities in Indiana that had football programs. At each of those schools, I photographed at least one football game. And because I have a genuine appreciation for the aesthetic appeal of college campuses, I also made landscape photos at each stop on the tour. For each visit, I posted game pictures on one day at this blog, then campus images on the next.
For the purposes of my project, my definition of a small college or university was any NCAA or NAIA Division II or III school. At the time Game Day technically began in 2009 and finished it in 2016, only 14 Indiana schools met that definition. They were Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology; Franklin, Wabash, Hanover, Earlham and St. Joseph's colleges; DePauw, Marian, Taylor, Manchester, Trine and Anderson universities; and the universities of Indianapolis and St. Francis in Fort Wayne. (Since then, Earlham has suspended its football program, and St. Joseph's has closed as a traditional four-year institution.)
Because the posts from the original Game Day project, like those of the Indy Acoustic Cafe, were scattered over several years, I realize many folks might not had a chance to see them all. Or even any of them.
So in this new series, which I’m calling Game Day Revisited, blog visitors can enjoy the full collection of installments from the original project — but updated and with some new photos included — in posts that will go active on consecutive days over a much more compact period of time.
In case you're wondering, these posts will not be a simple copy-and-paste thing from the previous posts. True, I did use a copy of the originals to begin composing each of the posts for this new series. But I have gone back into each one to fix typos, double-check facts, update information, add information, and swap out, improve and/or add new photographs into each one.
In some cases, the picture changes are minor, but for others they are significant. But in almost all cases, the text with each game post is expanded, containing new information. These game posts are longer than the originals, whether it is because of additional information, more pictures ... or both.
I also will provide considerably more information for each of the campus posts as well. The campus chapters will immediately follow (on the next day) the chapters of the school's respective football game, just as I did for the original project.
And like I did for the three recent series mentioned at the top of this post, I created a special logo for Game Day Revisited, and that's the logo you see leading off this post. It's a shot from one of my last stops on the tour, in Richmond, Ind., for Earlham College vs. Southern Virginia. I figured that game was appropriate given that the year after I visited Richmond, Earlham officials suspended the football program indefinitely. To this day, it remains in suspension.
Game Day Revisited posts will be presented in chronological order of visits on the tour. It also will include a bonus game that I did not consider part of the original project. That bonus game was a second stop (in 2012) at Franklin College.
This new series also will include three bonus non-game chapters -- one on tailgating photos I took at all the stops on the tour, another on school mascots and the third on marching bands, pep bands and/or dance teams at schools that had such units. They will be sprinkled about in the series chronology, although I will note that the one on marching and pep bands and dance teams will conclude the series.
As alluded to above, the installments will be labeled as chapters (borrowing from the organizational system I used for On Hoosier Gridiron and Garfield Park ... in Pictures).
I'll begin tomorrow with Franklin College, and its Sept. 26, 2009, game against Trine University.
This particular game (from which the photo above is taken) was examined intently in Chapter 12 of the On Hoosier Gridiron series, so if you were along for the full ride of On Hoosier Gridirons, you can be excused (and forgiven! LOL) if you pass over that first chapter of Game Day Revisited.
But you might want to come back the next day for Chapter 2, which will feature images from the Franklin College campus landscape. Photo Potpourri will use this series to present ALL of those Franklin College campus photos for the first time. I had not decided to begin the original Game Day project at the time I visited Franklin College in 2009 (even though I grandfathered it into the project as my first stop once I decided to make the tour a project).
And as it turns out, I never did a blog post on the campus landscapes shots that I took at Franklin College, most of which were made a month before that 2009 game.
Because I visited 14 schools on my Game Day tour, that means there will be a minimum of 28 chapters in total (two for each school -- one for game shots, and another for landscape shots). But there also will be a second visit to two schools for game shots.
As I mentioned above, I went to Franklin College a second time in 2012. But I also visited Wabash twice, once in 2011 for an early game on the tour. That was before I decided to photograph the Monon Bell Classic contests between Wabash and archrival DePauw University at each of their home fields. Given that my first Monon Bell Class game was at DePauw in 2011, I elected to go back to Wabash in 2012 to photograph the Little Giants as the home team.
And on top of all that, I'll have the three aforementioned bonus chapters of tailgating, mascots and marching/pep bands and dance teams. Some of the tailgating images were part of the original series presentations, but there are some new shots in the package as well.
As a example of a new photo that will be used in the series, I present the image above of Dwenger Hall from the campus of St. Joseph's College. This picture was not part of the original post of the school's campus shots in 2013. But it will be in the St. Joseph's campus chapter in Game Day Revisited, and you'll learn its interesting history in the process.
And as another teaser, while doing research and preparing chapters for this new series, I learned some interesting history and background about the Marian University campus. I'll share that with you when we get to that point of the series.
I’ve sprinkled some game and campus photos from the project into this introduction so you’ll have an idea what to expect in the days and weeks ahead.
I hope these series have been enjoyable for you ... and that I have made it worth your while to spend a little time here each day.
Coming tomorrow: Chapter 1, Franklin College, Sept. 26, 2009
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