Vintage Views of Annandale Editor’s note: Bard’s 150th anniversary offers an opportunity to read the College’s story in photographs. The digital collections of the Bard College Archives and Special Collections (www.bard.edu/archives), headed by Helene Tieger ’85, preserve Bard’s history in many different forms, including hundreds of photos. Drawing on these resources, the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs is compiling Bard in Black and White: Selections from the Bard College Archives, an exhibition that will open on campus on Alumni/ae Day, Saturday, October 16. Following is a sampling from three of the photographers—Peter Aaron ’68, Fred Greenspan ’75, and John Duke Kisch ’76—whose work will be part of that exhibition.
Peter Aaron ’68 As depicted in the photographs of Peter Aaron, Bard in the 1960s was an idyllic campus, where latter-day dryads and fauns pursued their studies amid wildflowers. “They were halcyon days,” says Aaron, who has since become a successful architectural photographer. “Our world was changing rapidly, but we were hopeful, discovering new ways to approach life, breaking the mold.” For Aaron, a shy and somewhat sheltered young man, “discovering new ways to approach life” meant acquainting himself with an area of social interaction that had previously been terra incognita on the map of his psyche. “I went to an all-boys high school, and when I got to Bard I was completely nonplussed by women,” he says with a laugh. “I took pictures that reflected my innocence.” Aaron’s trove of images also includes many studies of his Bard buddies, including Chevy Chase. Since Aaron knew the comedian “before the rest of the world did,” he says, he and Chase have always enjoyed a comfortable friendship and are in touch frequently. Photography was not Aaron’s area of study at Bard. He pursued a bachelor’s degree in physics, and his Senior Project entailed the creation of holograms in the basement of Hegeman Hall. “Hilton Weiss and Peter Skiff were both wonderful teachers who made science very accessible to me for the rest of my life,” he says. Today, with his wife, Brooke Allen, and their twin daughters, Aaron maintains a home in Manhattan and another about 20 minutes from the former site of Adolph’s, the fabled hangout of Bardians in the sixties.
Chevy Chase ’68 (left) and Peter Aaron
Bard students circa 1968
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