Frank Gruber, AB’74, did not deliberately set out to document campus life of the early 1970s. He just took photographs, first for the Maroon, then for himself. He shot jazz and folk concerts, political demonstrations, speakers including Tom Wolfe and Jesse Jackson, and the six-hour performance art piece A Day in the Life of the Mind: Part 2, created by Sally Banes, AB’72. Along the way he captured the funky fashions of the time: polyester, paisley, long frizzy hair, mustaches and beards and sideburns, socks with sandals.

Last fall Gruber, an entertainment lawyer, donated more than 850 of his images to the University of Chicago Photographic Archive at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. It’s the largest ever donation of photographs by a UChicago alum. His comments have been edited and condensed.

When did you start taking pictures?

I got interested in photography when I was in high school—I was the editor of my high school yearbook. Somehow I got a Praktica, a relatively cheap East German 35-millimeter camera. My father taught at Temple University, so I was able to use the darkroom there.

I was a competent photographer when I arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1970. I got better because I joined the Maroon, and Steve Aoki [AB’72, SM’73, PhD’79], the photo editor, took me under his wing. He taught me a lot.

In Spring Quarter of my first year, I got a funny moneymaking gig selling charter flights to Europe, and I made $800. Keep in mind, every dollar then is like $8 now—I paid $80 for my share of rent in Hyde Park, and the food bill each week, for our food co-op, was seven-and-a-half dollars. Anyway, an older guy on our block in Philadelphia had a Leica camera and two lenses that he wanted to get rid of. He sold them to me for $400. Having a camera like that makes you a lot more serious.

How did you choose what to shoot?

A lot of the photographs I took as a first-year—and maybe second-year, I can’t remember if I stuck with it—I took for the Maroon. There are demonstrations. A football game. Pictures of some people on campus for features the Maroon was doing.

My photographs in the archive start out being more public, and then gradually they become more personal, once I moved into an apartment and had my friend group. There are 850 photographs in that archive. Many more than I thought.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things I didn’t photograph that I wish I had. My apartment-mate, Alan Johanson [AB’74], and I founded an organization called Chicago Front for Jazz—that name is kind of an embarrassment, and probably was then, since the word “jazz” was going out of style among avant garde musicians. Along with Nia, the Black cultural organization on campus, we helped put on a lot of concerts by members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. In the archive there are photos of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but we put on a lot of other concerts at Ida Noyes Hall, and I don’t have photographs of any of them. I wish I’d saved our posters. I don’t appear to have done that.

I wish I had pictures of the Lascivious Costume Ball. In my second year, my roommate and I made beer for it. I went on one of these charter flights to Europe and I met a guy from Wales who wrote out the recipe. When I got back, we made beer in a trash barrel. It was terrible. I have since made beer, and you have to be really careful about sanitation.

A lot of your photographs capture student life in the early 1970s. What was the University like then?

Our generation was the middle of the baby boomers. The first wave of boomers got the biggest excitement out of the ’60s: rock and roll, then the anti-war protests, all the turmoil. When I arrived on campus in 1970, that was ending. We were still very political, except that the politics had changed a lot.

In my particular micro-part of the generation, a lot of energy went into the arts. We had fun, but it was makeshift. Just about anything you wanted to do, the students organized—Doc Films, the jazz concerts. The University didn’t do very much for the students, and that’s why so many kids dropped out. One reason I was able to sell charter flights to Europe was my roommate had left, and I had a dorm room to myself. So many friends from my first year dropped out.

At that time, a lot of people who went to the University of Chicago were self-selected misfits—very intellectual; it was a pretty idiosyncratic place. It was much cheaper to live in an apartment than in the dorm, so we created a kind of off-campus life. But I don’t want to romanticize it.

It sounds like you had to make your own fun.

The organization that was the best embodiment of that was Students for Violent Non-Action, SVNA, which had a drink called SVNA punch. Someone used to make it in the chem lab. I took a photo of people drinking SVNA punch on the quad.

Do you have any favorite photos in the archive?

I love the ones of the musicians. Those are pretty special. I’m proud of the subject matter.

There’s a set of photographs that I took that’s so University of Chicago. It was like a symposium in our apartment. I don’t know what we were talking about, but a whole group was just sitting around talking. That sequence I like a lot.

The photographs of A Day in the Life of the Mind: Part 2 I love, because I think it was very important to document that show.

There’s a photo of you on that day, taken by someone else, where you’re wearing what looks like a kaftan.

I did have a kaftan at some point. It was kind of a costume. Sally wanted me to wear something that indicated I was part of the performance, not just a photographer.

How does it feel to have your work preserved in the University’s archives?

I’m really proud of these photographs. I don’t know of too many other archives that have photos that show what young people actually looked like 50 years ago. If I were a costume designer for a film of that period, I would want to look at this.

Was photography an unusual hobby at the time?

It was a common thing among certain men who were kind of academic. I can’t tell you how many men my age, when I bring this up, say, “Oh, yeah, I used to go to the darkroom.”

Photography is so ubiquitous now it’s hard to imagine how rare it was to have quality photos taken. If you wanted to take a good photograph, it was an ordeal. You had to get a decent camera that might cost at the minimum $150, $200, which again, multiply by 10 or 12. You had to buy the film, shoot the film, process the film. And if you wanted to develop it yourself, you had to have access to a darkroom—but there were darkrooms all over the place. Every school had a darkroom.

When I visited my parents, I could shoot film, develop it right away, see what I got, and then shoot again. That’s how you learn to be a good photographer—doing it fast enough so that you see what you’re getting, and then based on that, do a better job. In the apartment where I lived in Hyde Park during my third and fourth years, there was a second bathroom, so I was able to use that as my darkroom.

When you first started taking pictures for the Maroon, what did you learn from Steve Aoki?

Basically, darkroom technique. It’s very detail oriented, and you have to be really clean.

I used to push the film in certain ways. There was an adage: underexpose and overdevelop. The ASA of the film—that’s the speed of the film—is how fast it reacts to light. So I would shoot a lot of film that was rated at 125, but set my light meter to say that it was higher, like 375. So I would underexpose it, but develop it for a longer period of time. It’s much debated, but the negatives look really good. You get more acutance, which is details in the shadows.

Did you consider becoming a professional photographer?

No. Most people who go into professional photography end up shooting weddings. It’s a very exclusive number who become known for artistic or news photography. It’s not an easy business to go into.

I wanted to make movies. I became an entertainment lawyer with the idea of becoming a movie producer or even director. It turned out I didn’t have the personality for that. In an alternative history, I might have trained to become a cinematographer. I had this idea that I needed to do something more intellectual, but of course, being a cinematographer is very intellectual.

Tell me about Railroad Apartment, the movie you made in 1973.

Well, it’s a student—it’s not even a student film, because the University did not have a moviemaking program. It was very amateur. I look back and think, “How come I didn’t learn some really basic stuff about making movies?”

I had one screening of it at Doc and that was it. But it has a very good soundtrack by Steve McCall and Fred Hopkins. They were part of the group Air, which is quite prominent. They did the score for me. I paid them something, and they just played behind the projector. You can hear the projector going in the soundtrack.

Was it hard to find all the negatives you donated? Were they buried in storage?

No, they were in my desk drawer. They’ve always been in a drawer, so they were in good shape. I was pleased about that, because I have friends whose negatives did not stay in good shape.

Do you still take photographs?

I live near the beach in Santa Monica, and during COVID, I used to take what I called my sanity walk every day. I did a series of signs in the shops on Main Street, in our neighborhood, apologizing for being closed.

Then I started taking my camera to the beach. There’s a giant storm drain that comes out at the beach, and when it’s raining, it carves a river through the beach. So I started taking pictures of how the beach was changed by the river with the Santa Monica Pier in the background. I’ve been trying to get a show of those somewhere.

I’ve had a couple of shows of my work in Italy. During the summer of 1971 we took a trip to the very south of Italy—Basilicata and Calabria. There aren’t a lot of photographs of southern Italy from that time. Not many people had good cameras. I didn’t have any kind of agenda. I was just a 19-year-old, pointing and shooting.