P69: Jock Lauterer Collection

Physical Description: Black-and-white negatives (35mm—3,097 exposures; 120—278 exposures) and photographs (157).

Provenance: Jock Lauterer, 2001.

Biographical Sketch: Jonathan Gregory “Jock” Lauterer was born in Bronxville, New York, but lived most of his life through the completion of his college education in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He once professed that he began working at the age of seven at the Chapel Hill Weekly—the same newspaper where he was employed as a reporter and photographer during the summer of 1967 after graduating with a double major in journalism and geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Lauterer excelled in photography even while a student at Chapel Hill High School, where he earned recognition from the North Carolina Scholastic Press Association. During his years as an undergraduate, Lauterer participated actively as a photographer and photography editor for the university’s student-run newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, participating in editorial decisions that reflected the rapidly changing nature of the college campus and current events of the mid 1960s. Lauterer not only contributed significant numbers of photographs, but also influenced the visual treatment of the publication.

Photographs with Lauterer’s byline first appear in the 1 August 1963 edition of the Tar Heel, the weekly summer edition of the Daily Tar Heel. The daily first printed photographs credited to Lauterer in the 1 April 1964 edition, part of a two-page spread covering a Klu Klux Klan rally in Chapel Hill. During the remaining months of the 1963–1964 academic year, the newspaper published his photographs in association with three other stories. This work led the Daily Tar Heel to select Lauterer as its photo editor for the 1964–1965 edition, succeeding James “Jim” H. Wallace Jr.

There are no photographs credited to Lauterer in the Daily Tar Heel during following academic year; staff rosters list Ernest Robl as the photographer, with no photography editor. During the summer of 1966 Lauterer accompanied the UNC Glee Club during its five-week tour of Europe. In 1966–1967 Lauterer reemerged as the photo editor, and his images consistently appear in the Daily Tar Heel—including several photographs and a written account of the glee club tour in the 13 September issue. A side bar accompanying that article states that Lauterer’s “sharp and imaginative work has been cited time and time again as a determining factor in the success of The Daily Tar Heel in collegiate press competition.”

Ultimately, the relationship between Lauterer and the Daily Tar Heel was mutually beneficial, the range of his work and his readiness to make the campus a part of the larger community was a direction the paper would continue to follow. His experience led him to a long career in community journalism, one that brought him back to UNC—this time as an educator.

In addition to exposure in the student newspaper, Lauterer’s work was featured in a solo exhibition on the UNC campus in Howell Hall in May 1966, and the book Only in Chapel Hill: a Photographic Essay published for the School of Journalism Foundation of North Carolina, by the Colonial Press in 1967.

After his collegiate career, Lauterer went on to become a journalist, editor and publisher for the McDowell Express in Marion, N.C. and the Daily Courier in Forest City, N.C. He redirected his career to become a professor in the Communications Studies department at Pennsylvania State University for more than nine years. In 2000 Lauterer returned to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a teacher and photographer for the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, and the founding director of the Carolina Community Media Project.

Lauterer’s published books include Wouldn’t Take Nothin’ for My Journey Now (1980), Runnin’ on Rims: Appalachian Profiles (1986), and Hogwild: a Back-to-the-Land Saga (1993); and Community Journalism: the Personal Approach (1995 and 2000). He also writes columns for the Chapel Hill News.

SOURCES

• Buchanan, Suzanne. "Jock-of-all-Trades Returns to Carolina." Carolina Communicator: April 2001.
• DePriest, Joe. “Exhibit Praised As ‘Photographic Song.’” Daily Tar Heel, 20 May 1966, page 3.
• Lauterer, Jock. Only in Chapel Hill: a Photographic Essay. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: UNC School of Journalism, 1967.
• Pollock, Roy. “Lauterer: Self-Confessed Ninny?” Daily Tar Heel, 19 May 1967, pages 1, 9.
• Daily Tar Heel, 1963–1967

Historical Sketch: The Daily Tar Heel has been in continual publication since 1893, initially as the Tar Heel under the auspices of the Athletic Association, and by 1921 as “The Official Organ of the Athletic Association.” In 1923 a major reorganization of student publications subsumed the newspaper under the newly created Student Publication Union Board, paid for by a student fee. The paper has been published as the Daily Tar Heel since 7 June 1929, except for periods during World War II and the Korean War. The newspaper became an independent entity in 1993. During the period cover by this collection, the Daily Tar Heel was self described as the “official news publication of the University of North Carolina.”

Collection Description: The Jock Lauterer Collection is predominantly composed of negatives made from circa 1964 through 1967 during the photographer’s years as an undergraduate student, a time that coincided with turbulent political and social changes. The topic with the most images documents the UNC Men’s Glee Club European Tour of 1966. Other images portray life in Chapel Hill, the UNC campus, and university activities. On a local scale, Lauterer captured idyllic small-town life, the serenity of campus, and the effects of politically charged times on a small community. Other events covered by Lauterer ranged from sporting events, anti-war protests (on and off campus), the Speaker Ban protests, Civil Rights marches and speeches, and local Ku Klux Klan rallies.

Many of the images found in Lauterer’s 1967 book Only in Chapel Hill are represented in the collection. Lauterer and Wayne A. Danielson, Dean of the School of Communication and the book’s editor grappled with the question of what content to include that would show the “piquant flavor” of Chapel Hill and campus life versus what Lauterer had “seen” in his four years at UNC. At that time, Lauterer seemed to prefer the “nicer” images of animals and everyday life, as apparent from his editorial decisions at the Daily Tar Heel and Only in Chapel Hill. Lauterer was fully engaged with events on campus and locally, however, and he made many images of political strife, rallies, and “be-ins” that represented student life of the late 1960s. He included many of these images in Only in Chapel Hill, with the quotation “I remember all the causes too, . . . . They were important to some of us and we fought for them.”

Many negatives can be matched to prints in the collection, a substantial number of which were included in Only in Chapel Hill. More than seventy-five negatives have been identified by the processor as photographs that appeared in the Daily Tar Heel between 1965 and 1967.

Arrangement: The collection is composed of two series: Negatives and Photographs; the negatives comprise two subseries organized by negative format: 35mm and 120. It should be noted that Lauterer sometimes used both camera formats to capture the same subject. Lauterer’s negatives had no internal organizational structure, but they were grouped by topics that were often labeled with whimsical abbreviations or colloquial terms, such as “Med Skool” or “Feetball”; those descriptions have been maintained, but the processor clarified them with descriptions contained in brackets. In order to organize the collection more thoroughly, the processor further grouped the images under more general categories drawn from Library of Congress Subject Headings. The photographs had no internal order and were similarly grouped by Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Subject Indexes:

Each heading in the following list is a hyperlink to a table that compiles the number of photographs and negatives for each of subject Lauterer's groupings:

• Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
• University of North Carolina—Addresses and speakers.
• University of North Carolina—Athletics.
• University of North Carolina—Campus.
• University of North Carolina—Employees and faculty.
• University of North Carolina—Glee Club.
• University of North Carolina—Social life and customs.
• University of North Carolina—Students.

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