Recently posted by Judith Aronson

Dear Readers,

When last I wrote I was just back in the US after two and a half years in Asia going from one adventure to another. It was 1973. A career now seemed not only a priority, but a necessity. I returned to New York City on my own with less than a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket, not a hardship, but a fact.

I began looking for work as a graphic designer. No luck. I was told repeatedly that I was too experienced for an entry level job. I begged, promising that I would sign papers saying I would stay for at least two years. Finally I began freelancing as photographer, graphic designer, or city planning consultant, whatever role anyone needed. I did work off and on in all of these fields for about eighteen months in New York and Boston. I photographed the de-institutionalization of the Human Service Programs in Massachusetts for the commissioner; I took photos of Sarah Caldwell, the Boston Opera Company director, and of Elaine Noble, the first openly GLBT person elected to public office, for Ms. Magazine. My biggest contract was as designer/project manager for the Where's Boston? bicentennial souvenir book for the architectural firm, Cambridge Seven Associates. This was the first book I designed from beginning to end. It was nerve wracking not having enough experience for the job, but I was determined to make it a success. I sought advice from one of my graduate school professors working in Boston, we met every couple of weeks for a serious critique. I certainly needed it. I was not only responsible for designing the book, but for providing any extra photos that were required, soliciting printing cost quotations, and for supervising printing of this book, as well as two others. At last I had some professional design and photography experience that I could use in my portfolio.

But like the previous ten years of my life, career didn't necessarily determine my moves. As long as I could support myself (nothing elaborate, I might add), I would go where the life seemed most interesting. I had not taken a penny from my parents since the day I graduated from college.

Just as this project was finishing I met the man I am now married to, an Englishman. Once again I picked up and moved to another country. From the professional point of view not the most helpful place -- Cambridge, England -- the boondocks, from the graphic design or photography standpoint. Picture this as my change of address card.

Old address:
900 West End Avenue,
New York, NY

New address:
Gorse Cottage
Home Close
Little Eversden

Cambridgeshire, England. (This was a thatched-roof cottage built in the late 1600s.)

I spent the next twelve years in England and still return often. In those days it was not easy to commute back and forth across the Atlantic nor could I afford it. I took a gamble that I would find work when I left the US.

After a year commuting five hours a day to London to work at the well-known design firm, Pentagram (they had helped me obtain the foreign work permit I needed), I  started freelancing as a book jacket designer and a photographer. Luckily I had my photos especially those I'd taken after moving on from the training-ground of the Insight Guides in Singapore. The Sunday Telegraph Magazine offered me my first break into photojournalism. While reviewing my slides, the photo editor mumbled, "We have this one story, London's Unusual Shops, ready to shoot. I'll give you a try, but don't tell anyone you live in Cambridgeshire; the newspaper doesn't want anyone working whose expenses include travel to the headquarters and we need you on the spot." (I was happy, of course, to pay expenses for the opportunity to become a photojournalist).

This first assignment proved to be one of the hardest I've ever done. There was so little light in most of the shops that I could hardly record the faces of my subjects and there were shiny surfaces (metal, glass, mirrors, etc.) everywhere causing images of myself to bounce around and into view of the camera lens from who knew where. But the Telegraph liked the story and I continued to be hired -- mostly for assignments about people in the arts.

I shot stories about famous people at work and at home. I became a sort of arts specialist. One assignment had me taking pictures of the Royal Shakespeare Company's pre-production activities for The Tempest, including rehearsals, the wig room, and the props shop where they were making a ten foot wave of plywood covered in black patent leather for the storm scene. I was thrilled to do this work; it connected me back to design. I thought to myself, "I would have paid the Telegraph for this opportunity instead of being paid." I photographed Sir Ralph Richardson, Jonathan Miller, Joan Plowright (Laurence Olivier's wife), Michael Horden, Keith Simpson (London's most famous pathologist) and more.

I worked for the Telegraph a number of years until I was asked jovially, but seriously to go on assignment to an oil rig in the North Sea in December. I was 8 months pregnant with my first child. The editor said he would send a helicopter for me if I went into labor. It was then I began thinking how I might return to design. In the early 1980s I got a position teaching design and photography courses at the Cambridgeshire art college.

By the time I moved back to the US in 1987 I was able to freelance in a variety of jobs. Still my aim was to find interesting work rather than work that would lead me higher up a career ladder. I worked as a design coordinator on the kindergarten twelfth grade Reading Experience program at Houghton Mifflin (having developed a passion for how children learn to read while volunteering at my children's school in England). I love the way design can connect to so many different interests. This led to more design work in educational publishing. I also took photographs on commission including those of Saul Bellow, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott for a Boston University symposium. Then I signed on to be a part-time design teacher at Boston University and later at The Massachusetts College of Art and Design, which happily I could do while working on the text book projects.

Over the years teaching began to take priority over my other work. And now, as you know, I am a full-time design educator. I came to Simmons about ten years ago and began full-time in 2004. My special interest is in teaching design principles, typography, information and environmental design, in conjunction with research and writing to be used with original art and photography created by the students. These subjects cover not only essential skills for designers-training, but for everyone interested in communications. They also suit the mission of a liberal arts college. Consider how studying the 30,000 year history of writing and printing, many examples of which can be found in Boston's museums and libraries, adds breadth to a student's knowledge. I encourage students from all the Communications tracks to study design. I also hope to offer workshops throughout the college.

From my stand point, the job I have could hardly be more suited to my interests and expertise. Not a day goes by that I don't think to myself how lucky I am to be at Simmons in this job. I continue to take small design commissions and have had exhibitions of both my color and black and white photography. As I write this blog, I am working on a photo book, Likenesses, of writers and artists.


Philip Pool in his pen shop, for the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, 1977
























Norman Mailer, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 2007




Sir Ralph Richardson, London, 1978, for the Telegraph Sunday Magazine

Dear readers,

Last month I wrote about my early life after college. I hope that it was clear that my experiences then are still with me today influencing all aspects of my design work. This month I will explain how serendipitous it was that I became a designer, and then recall further digressions (critical choices I made) before becoming a full-fledged practicing designer and now teacher of design.

While I was attending graduate school for city planning in the late 60s and early 70s there was an atmosphere of anxiety across the country about all students at all schools. We were labeled rebel rousers. Whatever it meant at other institutions, for mine, Yale University, it meant the administration avoided contact with the students and left us on our own. They seemed afraid of us. We could do what we wanted (even enroll in classes outside our prescribed area of study) as long as we didn't cause harm or injury to people or the institution. (Unfortunately the building that housed my department was set on fire and a few students became suspects; later it turned out that some local residents had been responsible.)

A little older than most of the grad students and paying my own way, I was determined to get my money's worth from the university, if not from the City Planning program that had been taken over by student activists the year I arrived. Soon I found myself taking the following classes among others: Constitutional Law, Economics of Land Finance, Life Drawing, and Intro to Graphic Design. (Other students got credit for community organizing projects in downtown New Haven. But I'd had my time as a block worker in East Harlem; now I was at school to beef up my academic credentials.)

Through an open doorway in the building where City Planning courses were held, I had noticed the Baby-Graphics course, as it was affectionately called, taught by Chris Pullman, a recent graduate of the design program who would later become the VP for design at WGBH in Boston. He welcomed me into this class saying I could audit all the design courses I wanted - he encouraged me to participate fully if I attended. What a thrill. I had always loved making things with my hands, but I never knew there was a college discipline devoted to design. I had been an American Studies major in college. By the time I'd completed my masters in City Planning two years later, I had as many courses in graphic design as anything else. The department permitted me to return to Yale for one extra year and I received a second master's degree in graphic design.

At this point any intelligent and career-minded person, would have moved to a city and found a job as a designer. I was, without question, the least trained of anyone in my class and clearly needed some first hand experience. But I had other plans. (While in VISTA I had married a civil rights lawyer whom I met a few years before in Mississippi. He was now serving in Saigon as the head of an organization called the Lawyers' Military Defense Committee that provided free legal counsel to GIs in the war zone. The program created by US lawyers and philanthropists who believed that the constitutional right of military personnel -- to be represented in court by a civilian attorney instead of a military attorney if requested -- was being denied, because of the distance from America. Who could afford to bring a lawyer to Saigon?) So after finishing my graduate work in 1971, instead of a job, I set out to join my husband in Vietnam and to see another part of the world. On the way there I would spend time in the Far East: I studied pottery in Kyoto for four months while teaching English to Panasonic engineers in Osaka, I took photographs for a graphic designer in Hong Kong, made my way over land and sea to Korea, and visited the gambling casinos in Macau. Finally around Christmas of 1971 I reached Vietnam.

Because I knew that I would need to earn money to travel in Asia, I had obtained forms for submitting freelance articles and photographs, plus a letter of introduction from the New York Times before leaving the US. (I had had some photo experience because in those days one was required to take photography when studying design; my graduate thesis was a slide show - no PowerPoint back then - on the garbage crisis in New York City.)  Armed with my letter from the Times indicating that I was a freelance photographer, I set out to take pictures of civilian life in Vietnam. (For example, I photographed a caesarian birth performed with only the aid of acupuncture.) Everyone else was photographing the war. I traveled the only way one could - by military transportation. It was an eye-opener. I cannot tell all the stories on this blog, but suffice it to say, some were heart rending, others terrifying as when our C130 plane was grounded due to fog, and we were forced to travel by jeep through an ambush zone with gunners at each window; or when my plane circled for four hours around the spot where an American pilot had been shot down, until he was rescued. Eventually I left South Vietnam because my husband and I were granted visas to North Vietnam - the first Americans allowed into this communist country in 2 years. Stories from there include our bugged hotel room and a hasty departure because the United States started bombing above the DMZ (demilitarized zone) in North Vietnam after a long quiet period. Our hosts feared for our lives.

We spent the next few months in Laos, a country swarming with CIA agents and American military who lived in a compound that resembled a perfect US suburb complete with swimming pool, movie theatre and popcorn. Imagine! (Vientiane, the capitol of Laos, had no paved roads at that time.) The CIA regularly tried to pry information from us. We hadn't much. While there I converted a letter to a friend back home about my experiences in Japan, into a story, and sent it off to the Times. Acquaintances told me honestly that it wasn't publishable; it was too personal. Imagine my surprise and delight, 6 months hence, when I found an acceptance letter and check for $400 waiting for me in Singapore. The article appeared on the front page of the Travel Section accompanied by a response from the Times Tokyo Bureau chief. For a while I thought I might try being a journalist and worked on a story about hippie travelers in Asia. I went to the home of the exiled Dali Lama in northern India where hippies tended to gather, and spent weeks at Hindu ashrams meditating and leading the ascetic life in order to experience the lives of these travelers.

But the lure of seeing the rest of Asia attracted me more than being a journalist. My husband and I roamed South-East Asia, first on a riverboat exploring a jungle in Borneo, then for three months taking in the sites and arts of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Finally we landed in Singapore where we joined two new acquaintances (a German photographer and American writer) to launch what are today known as the Insight Guide books with over two hundred titles. (The company was purchased by Houghton Mifflin in the 1990s). This, as one might imagine, was a totally different experience than the political life I'd been mostly leading previously. Here, working with one of the best photographers I would ever meet, but taking no pictures of my own, I learned virtually everything I know about how to take a picture. I also experienced a publishing company being created from scratch. We all did as many jobs as we could. I created a comprehensive photo archive for the photographer, Hans Hoefer, <http://www.hoefernet.com/>, accompanied him on shoots in places as far away as the Himalayas in Nepal. It was during these sessions, by some sort of osmosis, that I learned the techniques required to convince a timid subject to let one take his/her photograph, to understand what unusual angle would work best to bring the subject to the printed page, and to know what lens would suit the subjects' peculiarities. Without taking any pictures of my own, I seemed to learn all the skills I needed to later be a professional photographer.

I took no pictures for almost a year while I worked in Singapore. Then I left the publishing company, deciding that I must return to America because I was becoming too entrenched in the cushy life westerners had in Asia. Something told me I was avoiding what I should really be doing. It was all so appealing and comfortable in those foreign, but hospitable lands. It took me five months traveling through Nepal, India, Israel, and Greece before arriving back in the USA in the fall of 1973. Then I began looking in earnest for work as a graphic designer.

Here are some photos from those days:

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This ends Phase 2 of my adult life. Tune in next month for the story of my becoming a professional photographer and designer.

Because most people I meet have a set image of a graphic designer that is quite distant from, or only part of, the truth, I hope that through this blog I can broaden that view. I thought I might start by telling people a little about my own background a greatly expanded version of what I tell my students the first day of class. My career has been anything but straightforward, zigzagged in fact, and I want students to understand that being a graphic designer can and should encompass more than laying out brochure pages or a website. How they find design-work that is more than commercial, hopefully a public service, is up to them. But having a liberal arts background is a good way to start.

I've now been teaching at Simmons almost ten years and it's the longest employment in one place I've ever had. I love teaching and couldn't be happier. Up until I took a full-time job at Simmons about five years ago, one might say that my career was more about pursuing adventure than following a career path, as long as I could earn a living at the same time. When I graduated from college in the 1960s I drove from Michigan the day after graduation to Washington, DC, stayed a few nights in a YMCA and found a job as the receptionist for Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps. One might say of this position -- high profile without any serious responsibilities except being pleasant to all the fascinating people who got off the elevator. I also had to read the New York Times and clip relevant material for Sargent Shriver. The crucial thing was that the position put me in contact with many intelligent and savvy people in Washington.

Within six months, through one of my acquaintances at the Peace Corps, I learned of what would be my next job -- program analyst in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. At this job I researched voter registration policies in the D.C. office and traveled to Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana to assist the department attorneys who were enforcing, case by case, the civil rights act of 1964, recently passed by congress. (On one occasion, when preparing evidence for a trial of hooded Ku Klux Klan members, the worst hurricane prior to Katrina ravaged New Orleans including my hotel room.) This job suited me perfectly as I'd been active in high school and college organizing civil rights campaigns. However, it wasn't long before I felt I needed to get out of offices and be in the field. I knew if I didn't work directly with the people affected by the programs that employed me while I was young, I might not be motivated to leave home again. Because I'd seen much about the Peace Corps as a staff member, I decided to volunteer for the new start-up, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and was sent to East Harlem to become a community developer with a non-profit: Block Communities Inc. Each block worker, as we were called, took an apartment on a different block and was responsible for surveying every household there and then facilitating meetings about common problems. We were not supposed to do anything directly for our neighbors or the neighborhood. Our job was to bring the people together, conduct meetings, and try to find a leader in the community who would take over our job -- work ourselves out of a job. We were steeped in the methods of community organizing and group work, and trained by the New York Drug Rehabilitation Department. We were taught how to make things happen without our doing anything but talk to people. Exhausting, but very rewarding if/when a tiny change occurred. I was lucky because by the time I left East 118th Street, two neighbors, a Puerto Rican and an African American, were not only ready, but wanting to be responsible for the one block community where we lived. And the teenagers on the street had developed a summer program for the youngest children after learning in 40 or 50 block meetings how to apply for an Anti-Poverty Program grant from the federal government -- an education itself as meaningful as most had had before dropping out of high school.   

I re-enlisted in VISTA for a second year, spent another year as supervisor and training director, participated in a 72 hour (no sleep) drug rehabilitation session as part of our training, got married to a civil rights lawyer I had met in Mississippi, all this while the peace movement and race riots blanketed the US. Suddenly it seemed, that being white, in the predominantly Puerto Rican and Italian East Harlem, I should take a back seat to the people in the neighborhood when it came to working for change. The civil rights movement was different by then. I decided that if I wanted to continue my present work, I should go back to graduate school and become what we were then calling "advocate planners" -- city planners who represented a community, rather than the government, in a public service way.

You might say this ended Phase I of my adult life. I will stop here to see what responses, if any, I get. The next time I write I may explain how at graduate school I changed plans completely, received a degree in graphic design, and upon graduation changed directions yet again. Instead of trying to pursue a career, I ended up in South-East Asia and Vietnam (during the war). This trip was planned to last four months. I didn't return to the US for two and a half years and then only for eighteen months.