Michael Rosenblum

In 1972, I entered Williams College as a freshman at the age of 17

17 is too young to start college, trust me, and so I spent the first two years in a kind of a fog. My father wanted me to attend law school, so I took a number of law and economics classes. One of my professors, Bob Gaudino, who taught a year-long course in political philosophy, took me aside and told me to drop out. “You’re wasting your time here- you don’t know who you are.”

So I did – working with him I left for a year and went to live with families in Appalachia, work on a farm in Iowa, work construction pouring concrete. I took a camera with me. Or gave me an excuse to be places I didn’t belong. You can’t tell coal miners that you’re there to find yourself. But you can tell them that you’re there to take pictures. That they’ll accept. And that’s what I did.

When I came back to school, I took a room with Tom Krenz, who was the art professor, and later became the director of the Guggenheim Museum. I gave up pre-law and became an art major focusing on photo silkscreen printing.

When I graduated, I got a grant from the Watson foundation to spend three years traveling around the world photographing, and that photography and Travel led me to my career in television and everything else that followed.