Marquette's rich history of tradition is being celebrated in a new photo exhibit at the Haggerty Museum of Art this semester.
Starting Jan. 25 the museum will present "Marquette Then and Now: Images Celebrating 125 Years of Faith and Learning in Action," one of several special events included in the university's 125th anniversary celebration.
The exhibition, which is scheduled to run through April 1, contains a series of pictures representing Marquette's students, places and events and their transformations throughout the years. While some places have transformed dramatically, several historical pictures of student life seem all too familiar.
Museum Director Curtis Carter said the exhibit is a joint project of the 125th Anniversary Committee and the museum. Carter worked with Dan Johnson, chief photographer of the Instructional Media Center, and Annemarie Sawkins, associate curator at the museum, to put together the exhibit.
The exhibit "brings history and today together through photography," Carter said.
"Our approach to the pictures at first started with campus life pictures, but as the project progressed, we started to go in the other direction and looked for things that are important to the university right now, such as community service," Johnson said.
Johnson and Matt Blessing, head of special collections and university archives at Raynor Memorial Libraries, presented Sawkins with their idea for the exhibit, Sawkins said.
Johnson and Blessing first proposed their plan with four to five pairs of pictures they had created to try to represent a broad range of people, events and places, Sawkins said.
Johnson, who took the modern pictures over the course of the last year, said he shot some of the photos from the same angle as the archived photos to show change in the campus itself. Others are interpretations of how life has changed technologically.
Sawkins said one particularly striking pairing was a photo of the 1888 graduating class of six students juxtaposed with a photo of the class of 2006, containing about 1,196 students.
The exhibit will officially begin with a reception on Feb. 7 from 3 to 5 p.m. Johnson, Blessing and Thomas Jablonsky, director of the Institute for Urban Life and associate professor of history, will speak at the reception.