Matt
Cashore, ND class of 1994 has been photographing the Notre Dame
campus for 15 years. He's shot the Dome, the ducks, the joggers
by the lakes. Football games and tailgaters. Classrooms and labs
and assorted "campus scenes." The arrival of freshmen, the pageantry
of commencement, the casual solemnity of residence hall Masses.
He's taken portraits for annual reports, aerial shots for historic
purposes and documentary stills of presidential visits.
His first Notre Dame assignment came in 1990. He photographed
his own freshman orientation for the Dome, the student
yearbook. As a student, he shot for all the campus media, took
a couple of photography classes, "did tons of photography and
learned how to hide from the building monitors in LaFortune,"
the building that housed the student media offices at that time.
"I would keep on working there in the darkroom till 4 or 5 in
the morning," he recalls. "I spent most of my senior year on the
third floor of LaFortune." He was photo editor of the Dome
that year -- and got his first assignment from Notre Dame
Magazine (a couple of faculty portraits).
Since
then he has contributed countless photographs to this magazine.
His work has filled these pages, appeared on the home page of
the University's website, taken our readers into the secret corners
of "the unseen Notre Dame," and exposed them to the crazy biker
rally held annually in the Black Hills of South Dakota. A contract
photographer for Notre Dame's Athletic Department, Cashore has
seen his photos in Sports Illustrated, The New York Times
and ESPN: The Magazine. His freelance work easily consumes
a 40-hour work week, but he also has a full-time job. He is a
videographer with WNDU-TV, working the 3:30 a.m. to noon shift.
He also finds time to fly his own airplane and this spring went
skydiving for the first time.
But it is his still photography that drives and excites him
professionally. "I get to get into places I have no business being,"
he says. "Any assignment where I get to climb stuff is always
fun. And it broadens my horizons. I get to experience other people's
lives for a half-hour at a time, and that's fun -- especially
when it's unexpected and unique."
It
is not unusual for creative people to improve with age and experience,
and Cashore's photographs demonstrate what happens when talent,
hard work and maturity come together. But one of the remarkable
aspects of his work is the elevation in quality even though the
subject matter has remained the same. Cashore has shot on campus
for 15 years, yet his images are persistently fresh, the view
through his lens perpetually innovative, his eye ready to see
new meaning in familiar terrain, to catch the predictable moment
from the unexpected angle.
"The seasons help," he says, trying to explain this knack for
capturing domes and spires and statues and quads as if for the
first time. "But mainly it's that the light is always different
-- every day and every minute of the day. And it's being ready
to be surprised that this thing you have passed 100 times and
seeing how at this time, this season, this day, how it looks unlike
it has the other 99 times you've passed it by. There's always
something a little different about the light at each particular
moment in a day."
After 15 years we thought it time to gather some representative
photos into a gallery. So here's a partial collection of moments
when the light and the eye and the lens coincided to capture and
freeze in time a vivid piece of the Notre Dame experience.
(July 2005)
