The Daily’s photography department at the beginning of the 1980s was about long hours, Domino’s pizza and intense rivalry between those of us who owned Canon equipment and those of us who owned Nikon gear. We shot film, we developed the film, we made prints and sized them for halftones, and we dropped them right into the layouts being done by hand in the graphics department. No digital, no scanners, no computers in photo. Man, do I sound old.
Without an instructor/adviser, we were left to ourselves to figure out all kinds of technical problems, to push the editors to run bigger pictures and photo essays, and to find new ways to shoot the same events every year.
My most vivid memory of working as a Daily photo editor is, of course, being on the sidelines at Big Game 1982. I also remember road-tripping to a space shuttle landing in the Mojave Desert, standing in the rain alongside photo co-editor Greg Webb, ’84, waiting for the Queen of England to visit University President Donald Kennedy, and spending countless spring Saturdays leap-frogging from one varsity sporting event to another.
Beyond the long hours, occasional nudity and photographic trial and error, friendships were the most important thing I took away from the Daily. All my Stanford friends with whom I am still in touch are people I met at the Daily.
We had more fun taking photos of each other (egographs is the technical term) than we did shooting any Stanford sporting event. The definitive body of work of these images was collected in 1990 by Rod Searcey, ’84, and published as The Egograph Collection. We had a blast and have the pictures to prove it.
Art Streiber, ’84, is a professional photographer in Los Angeles whose clients include Vanity Fair, Wired and O, the Oprah Magazine.
