Ronald Hunter Hardin Photographs

The Ron Hardin photographs were created at Oberlin College for the Hi-O-Hi, the yearbook, from 1961 to 1963. Hardin was a student from 1959 to 1963, graduating with a BA in Mathematics. A good many of the images were published in the 1963 yearbook, but the photographer kept his portraits of Igor Stravinsky, a guest during the 1963 Festival of Contemporary Music.  Portraits of faculty and staff include President Robert K. Carr, Frederick B. Artz, J.D. Lewis, Friedrich Fassbinder, William Sellers, John Kurtz, Andrew Bongiorno, Thomas Whitaker, Paul Arnold, Clarence Ward, Patricia Rose, Lysle Butler, Barry McGill, Alfred Schlesinger, Dean Mary Dolliver, Robert Neil, and others not yet identified. Typical of yearbook photographs, the majority are shots of students engaged in activities, and views of campus, with or without students and others. The photographer also took aerial shots from an airplane of the campus and surrounding areas.

The photographs have been sorted into general subjects for ease of retrieval. The first folder in the first box holds a number of images under the heading Artistic Compositions. These reflect the aesthetic of the early 1960s in black and white photography, with a propensity toward abstraction and high contrast. Many of these appear in the first few pages of the 1963 Hi-O-Hi, uncaptioned and accompanied by quotes from published works or manuscripts, including a letter by one of Oberlin’s founders. The one oversize photograph in the collection appears as a two-page spread at the beginning of the yearbook, depicting a cornfield and rooftops of farm buildings beyond it, accompanied by an entry for Ohio in a 1929 Spanish encyclopedia. The images in the 1963 yearbook were thoughtfully placed with respect to each other and to text; this was likely the work of Ron Hardin as a yearbook staff member and photographer.