Through
Stephen Lewellyn's lens, a bygone U of C campus come to
life.
Stephen Lewellyn, AB'48, still remembers
the first photograph he ever took: at age 8 or 9, he used
an Eastman Kodak box camera to snap a picture of a friend
riding a pony. "I cut the kid's head off," he
says. "I got the whole pony in though." Some practice
helped his form, and from the late 1940s to the early 1970s
the third-generation photographer took expert pictures for
the U of C.
Born in 1921 in Plymouth, Indiana, Lewellyn
enrolled at the University in 1940. His education was interrupted
by WW II, during which his plane was shot down and he spent
11 months in a German prison camp. He returned to campus
and wife Lois-whom he'd met when they both waited tables
at the Quad Club and married during a week off from pilot
training-in time for her 1945 graduation.
Taking photos for the Maroon,
the yearbook, the Magazine, and University events
helped him pay tuition after his two-year scholarship ran
out. He earned a business degree, but the corporate world
wasn't for him. Instead the couple opened their first photo
studio at Stony Island and 67th, and today their two sons
are photographers.
After Lois died in 2000, Lewellyn
moved into Hyde Park's Montgomery Place Retirement Community,
where he uses a digital camera to take portraits of new
residents. Last year he donated more than 10,000 black-and-white
negatives to the Special Collections Research Center, which
is showcasing Lewellyn's prints through January 10.
Contact