About a year ago WM Editor Steve Charles slid this photograph across his desk at me.
“Do you know who this is?” he asked. I didn’t.
“Well, you should,” he said. “That’s Bob Petty.”
Months earlier at Awards Chapel I had received the Robert O. Petty Prize for Nature Writing for a nonfiction essay about my travels in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I was embarrassed, at first, to not even know what the man looked like.
But why should I have known? Professor Petty died the year I was born.
Steve told me that Petty was a botanist, writer, and poet and he handed me a copy of the photo to keep with me. That spring he hired me as an intern for the magazine and gave me a copy of Petty’s LaFollette Lecture about “The Margins of the Humanities” to read.
But the focus of my work was slogging through two metal filing cabinets filled with thousands of photographs, many of them marked with the stamp of the now-defunct Wabash College News Bureau, and getting them ready to transfer to the College archives. Steve also told me to set aside those I found most interesting.
It was an odd task for a Wabash junior. I began to encounter people I had never seen before (like Petty), buildings that have since been torn down (Waugh, Kingery), and events that no longer take place (donkey basketball, the Caveman Bouts). I saw my ignorance as a weakness: How was I supposed to do these photographs justice when I didn’t even know what I was looking at?
But maybe justice is overrated.
At least the sort found in posed shots of administrators on a well-lit day participating in a ribbon-cutting ceremony, or breaking ground on a new building, or the well-timed capture of professors in their prime, smiling and teaching with arms raised, well-dressed students in the background. The sort of justice in the photographs you may find on our Web site and in our magazine, the ones that show what the College should be.
This photograph of Robert Petty is not one of those. Better images of Petty exist—posed shots in which he holds a magnifying glass up to a leaf, studying it as if he didn’t know the photographer was standing five feet away. There is no context for this photograph aside from the exposed pipes and the 1960s-era Pepsi can. The single redeeming feature is Petty’s facial expression: It seems genuine.
Steve used this photograph once before in the magazine. He cropped it into an oval around Petty’s head, eliminating the Pepsi can, the watch on the table, the exposed pipes, and, of course, those horrible chalk lines. But in doing so he made the image what we want to see, without conflict or questions. That’s hardly the Professor Petty whose words I’ve read: He seemed all about questioning.
In his 1982 LaFollette Lecture, Petty said: “All of us can and do learn much at the far margins of our own disciplines, at the frayed borders between our own understanding and the unique knowledge of others.”
“Margins are at the edge of the already known,” Petty wrote. “They are, in many ways, the most interesting.”
I think that Professor Petty would agree that the photographs on the following pages—images that might have never been published in whole or at all—represent the historical margins of this College. They are the offbeat photographs, the ones that don’t always have neat conclusions. They do the College justice in ways only those who lived and learned here understand.
And that’s where you come in.
Unlike me, many of you know some of the people pictured here. You studied and worked and learned beside them; you can do these images justice. Tell me something about them; I’d like to know.
Then the next time Steve pushes a photograph in front of me and asks, “Do you know who this is?” I can say, “You don’t know the half of it!”
Contact Ian Grant at imgrant13@wabash.edu