A Yale album - Richard Benson

This engaging photograph album of Yale's third century contains a rich and surprising assortment of pictures selected by the photographer Richard Benson. Punctuated with essays by past and present notables of the Yale community and by Benson's own commentary, the album moves from Old Yale at the turn of the century to challenges facing the university in the new millennium. The people, events, objects, and settings encountered along the way have contributed to the making of the Yale experience in the twentieth century.

Published on the occasion of Yale University's tercentennial celebration, the album opens with the bicentennial years and a charming evocation of college life before World War I. The next section chronicles the great building boom on campus-including the transition to a residential college system-prompted by the generous bequests of John Hay Whitney, John Sterling, and Edward S. Harkness. A campus transformed by world events is depicted in sections on Yale between the wars and during World War II. About midway through the volume and the century, the focus turns to campus life, including athletics, the growth of the arts, the political turmoil of the sixties and seventies, and the advent of coeducation. Following a photo essay on life at Yale today, the album concludes, as does Yale each academic year, with the ebullient rituals and regalia of commencement.

For all those who are, were, or hope to be part of the Yale community, Benson has created an exceptional memento from the bounty of Yale's archives.

Richard Benson is dean of the Yale School of Art and coauthor with John Szarkowski of A Maritime Album.