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UPDATED: March 31, 2021 at 9:53 a.m.

Doug DuBois reimagined the course content for his art photography class in December.

To start, the associate professor reached out to his department chair in the College of Visual Performing Arts program, who recommended contacting Joseph Hernon, director of emergency management and business continuity at Syracuse University.

On Dec. 21 at 12:28 p.m., DuBois sent Hernon an email. About 20 minutes later, Hernon responded, “Happy to connect on this. Feel free to call.”

With Hernon’s help, DuBois has coordinated photo shoots and walkthroughs with his class in campus buildings. This enables students to document what SU looked like during the pandemic as a semester-long initiative. At the end of the semester, the University Archives will house the finished products from the class along with submissions from other SU students, faculty and staff for future generations to observe.

“We’re thinking 100 years from now, (the photographs are) just gonna look ridiculous,” DuBois said.

“Art Photography 265: Beginning Seminar in Photography” meets once a week for four hours both over Zoom and in person. One of the challenges for DuBois is the hybrid nature of the class, as some students are studying remotely and don’t have access to the same equipment or landscapes as on-campus students.

Remote students are studying from cities such as Memphis, Tennessee, and New York City. DuBois wanted to engage the remote students as much as he could, so he allowed them to build their own curriculum, as long as it included documenting the pandemic from their hometowns.

SU junior Ryan Ally decided to study from his home in Queens this semester after spending the fall semester stuck inside his apartment in Syracuse. Ally’s project focuses on the social climate in New York City, and on most weekends, he ventures out of his home in Queens to take photos of New Yorkers and the city’s skyscraper landscape.

For Ally, the quiet nature of Times Square is jarring to observe. Last weekend, he shot photos at the Brooklyn Bridge and said it almost looked like pre-coronavirus times, based on the number of pedestrians out walking.

Professor Doug DuBois (left) and Bencich write descriptions for masks to go into the University Archives. Louis Platt | Asst. Culture Editor

“That was my one wish like I could be a photographer in New York City while still going to Syracuse,” Ally said. “It’s really convenient that I got to do this semester while photographing from my home.”

While students studying remotely pitched their semester-long COVID-19 archive project to DuBois, on-campus students have three major projects they will complete throughout the semester.

The goal of the three projects is to build up to something ambitious. Students for the first project walked throughout campus taking photos of the approximately 1,400 hand sanitizer stations stationed around SU.

While it may sound like an easy task to take photos of still objects, it turned out to be quite a rigorous project, DuBois said. The class intends to submit about 200 photos to the University Archives, but on Tuesday, DuBois informed the class that at least 40 have to be retaken because they are out of focus.

“It ain’t easy,” DuBois said. “I’m like, what’s our system? Everyone has to look the same … How do you make sure you’re the same distance? It’s squared up? The colors are the same tonality?”

Connecting with University Archives was a way for him to legitimize the work his students are doing this semester, something SU sophomore Lilly Bencich has enjoyed about this project. Bencich said she knows VPA students that are tired of projects related to COVID-19, but that this one is interesting and important for its historical relevance.

Xinyuan Xu documents the description of generic masks. Louis Platt | Asst. Culture Editor

“For college students right now, I think it’s easy to forget how historical what we’re going through is,” Bencich said.

Meg Mason, a university archivist at the Special Collections Research Center, said over email that the University Archives has very few records or documentation about what SU’s campus was like during the Spanish flu. Normally, the archive does not collect coursework — besides dissertations and master’s theses — but they have made an exception for this year to document SU’s community response to the pandemic.

A challenge that the photographers and archivists are dealing with is transferring the metadata for each photo from the class’ files to the archives’ files. In the past, photos would have been accompanied by a physically written description, but now, students write the description, subject’s location and the photographer’s name in a metadata template on Adobe Bridge.

Once the hand sanitizer photos are complete, the class will print out a 100-foot long print with photos of the hand-washing stations and hang it in Shaffer Hall for students to observe.

“If you see a 100-foot print with that you get a real visual sense of literally the expense, the cost, the maintenance and really what we’re in,” DuBois said. “What ridiculous lengths were going to to make this work.”

On Tuesday, students in Syracuse shot their second project, the mask fashion show. DuBois asked students to bring any masks that they could find including ones sewn last summer with parents, ones gifted to them from their grandparents, or generic masks like three-ply medical face masks and N95 masks.

Sophie Walter writes down the description for handmade masks. Louis Platt | Asst. Culture Editor

The class’s goal is ultimately to build on the students’ fundamental knowledge of photography. But through the lens of the pandemic, they have fewer facial features and aspects of body language to take into account, sophomore Xinyuan Xu said.

“With masks on, subjects are hiding feelings,” Xu said.

Instead, students took into consideration the masks’ designs before posing subjects. As SU sophomore Sewahhiss Hemlock took portraits of Bencich, he asked her to look off into the distance since she was wearing a mask with stars and he wanted it to look as if she was gazing at a night sky.

In about two weeks, the students will work on their final project for DuBois’ class which will take place in the Carrier Dome. DuBois said the students will document how the Dome has transformed into a COVID-19 testing site on campus and it’s something students are looking forward to.

“For all of us, the thought of having as photo students exclusive access to (the Dome) that we can photograph, it’s really interesting and then I’m motivated,” Bencich said.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, the type of work that the University Archive has made an exception to accepting this year was misstated. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on March 30, 2021 at 10:34 pm

Contact Louis: louis@dailyorange.com | @JBL__98