Wheaton College

I never thought, as an incoming freshman back in August 1985, that I would one day take more pictures of Wheaton College than anyone else in the history of the college. But if you consider that I’ve been taking thousands of pictures there each year, every year, for the past thirty-nine years, that’s a lot of pictures… in fact, I estimate I’ve taken almost a million photos on both film and digitally.

I’ve been hired by almost every department on campus at some time or another, but as the official photographer for Wheaton Thunder sports teams, I’ve taken more pictures for the Athletics Department than all others combined. If you’ve ever been part of a Wheaton team in the last forty years, I almost certainly have taken your picture.

I was also one of the main photographers for the Wheaton Magazine for over thirty years– that is, until I was recently told that to continue shooting for the magazine, I’d have to sign over full copyright to my images (professionals don’t do that), so I politely declined. But for years, I would shoot some of Wheaton’s best known alumni and professors, as well as some of the lesser known ones (such as the alumnus from the 1960s who sang backup for Elvis), and four of the last eight presidents. I loved magazine assignments because it not only introduced me to some very interesting people, but they gave me free rein to be creative on assignments and to take some really memorable pictures.

I shot my first graduation- my sister’s- in May 1986, for the Tower yearbook. I missed the ‘87 graduation, but then shot every one after that until 2023- a run of thirty-six straight commencements, not to mention a dozen or more graduate school graduations over that time too.

But my favorite Wheaton College images are the ones I took as a student from 1985-89. I was learning photography and taking pictures of friends, teachers, sports and the campus. As a Record and Tower photo editor and photography contributor for all four years, I was granted access to almost event on campus and became known as Wheaton’s photographer, even back then. I was rarely without a camera in my hand; during my year as the Tower Photo Editor (1987-88), I always carried two cameras everywhere I went- one loaded with black and white film and one with color slide film.

I’ve always been organized and never got rid of any of my photos– negatives, slides and prints– I still have them all and have scanned all the film from those early days and turned them into high resolution digital images that can now be widely shared for the first time ever. College Union concerts, Men’s Glee Club singing at Soldier Field, the Ice Cream Socialist furor, President Liftin’s inauguration, Homecoming parades, Scott and Carolyn, the Revival of ‘95, Billy Graham’s return to campus in 1985 and his last visit in 1995, streakers at soccer games in the early 2000’s (yes, it really happened at Wheaton), and beloved teachers like Beatrice Batson, Joe McClatchey, Lyle Dorsett and Arthur Holmes. I’ve photographed them all, and have enjoyed documenting the history of the college for forty years now.

Many of these pictures have never been seen by anyone but me… ever. I want to share them now before I’m gone one day, and if they bring back memories of when you were young, before you started working, before you got married, started a family and settled into ‘real life’– specially if you find a picture of yourself that you didn’t even know existed, then all the better.

But…. all these photos have come at a cost for me- not only did I spend hundreds of hours taking the pictures, developing the film and then safely storing the negatives, but even more time has been spent over the past five years digitizing tens of thousands of images, and adding captions and keywords, figuring out the dates they were all taken, etc. So I have to charge something for the digital copies or prints I send out to recoup my costs. If you feel led to throw in a few dollars more to help defray expenses (I’ll never make a profit on these pictures), you can Venmo me @Michael-Hudson-Photo.

If you see a picture you’d like to have a print of, shoot me an email and I’ll let you know how you can get it.