Wake Forest Magazine invited five professional photographers who are alumni to return for 48 hours. They zoomed in on the Wake Forest they want you to see.
From the patio overlooking The Pit entrance, Mark Atkinson (’77) took multiple photographs of students and later created this composite image, toned to black and white.
Mark Atkinson (’77)
I came back to Wake Forest in mid-October 2023 in much the same way I’d landed as a freshman more than 50 years ago. I had no real plan and not a clue as to how things might turn out.
This was the place I learned how to learn. The place that taught me how to listen. That forced me to look around. Opened my eyes. This was the place that gave voice to feeling. A figuring-out place. The place that sent me on a journey I was unaware of, until I left.
I had no idea of a life path before landing at Wake in the late summer of 1973. We were asked — the freshman class — to read Maya Angelou’s (L.H.D. ’77) “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and I skimmed through it in that busy summer leading up to college. My own coming-of-age story had begun the year before, when my father died suddenly and I was promoted to head of house, with two sisters, a brother and a mom trying to sort out what our new family looked like and how we might survive.
I majored in business, not because I loved it, but because it seemed like a good job major, and I knew I would need one when I got out. As graduation neared, I interviewed with banks, brokerages, accounting firms, big corporations and the like. I glazed over trying to answer just where I saw my life in five years. Around that time, my mother loaned me money to buy a camera. Gradually it taught me a new way to see, and to map out, the world for myself.
We were mostly at peace together, this camera and I, though sometimes at war. My life would be a creative endeavor and the camera somewhat a license to invade the lives of fascinating people I’d meet on my journeys.
It has been 47 years since I graduated. Aside from the few trips back for football games, I’ve spent little time on campus. Understandably, it’s a very different place — yet still familiar. The entryway, the Quad, Wait Chapel, The Pit, the library all remain among the new buildings I’d never seen. This is naturally a bigger place. And 36 hours is merely scratching the surface.
It is fall 2023 when I land, perhaps the most beautiful time of year on campus. The trees are fiery and the skies filled with pinks and blues. A full moon is a bonus, coming out big and early and idling through the first hints of morning. I’ve had plenty of time to think about some theme I might take on after saying yes to this invitation to return to campus. And yet I’ve landed without a concrete plan. So I decide to find what was familiar, have a pleasant walkabout, enjoy this time and see how I see things now. I’m also pressed to think back to my time on campus, the people I knew and loved and all that transpired to set me on a path to be this person. All the seeds were planted here.
MARK ATKINSON (’77) of Virginia Beach, Virginia, is an accomplished professional photographer, documentarian and writer who started his career at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a partner and creative director at Otto Design + Marketing. His work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, Washingtonian, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Marie Claire and numerous other publications. The Chrysler Museum of Art, the Hermitage Museum, the Fayetteville (NC) Museum of Art, the Maine Photography Show and Communication Arts have exhibited Atkinson’s photography.
