Andrew Franklin - Campus Life in the 70s

Andrew Franklin (PH ‘75) documented life at RIT in the early 1970s and amassed one of the largest single collections of images of student life during the early years on the new campus in Henrietta, New York. 

Franklin came to RIT in 1971 as an art major, but soon transferred to photography with a focus on photojournalism, inspired by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. From that point, he was rarely without a camera, regularly capturing candid images of campus life and of the still-new campus itself. While at RIT, Franklin worked for the Reporter and for the yearbook Techmila, where he was editor in chief in 1974-75. Many of his images appeared in those publications, but many others have remained unprinted until now. 

After graduation, Franklin began a career at NBC News, where he worked for many years on NBC Nightly Newsas a producer, writer, and for five years, Senior Producer for international news. He has had an ongoing role in NBC’s political coverage over the years, and was a founding producer at MSNBC, where he produced the archival program Time & Again with Jane Pauley. Franklin recently helped produce the NBC special, “Tom Brokaw: The First 50 Years.”