Carl Vernlund Joins Faculty as Interim Photo Teacher
By Forrester Hammer ’10
News Reporter
While Mr. Bob Mellon enjoys a sabbatical, Mr. Carl Vernlund, a professional photographer of architecture and interior design, is acting as his replacement. Mr. Vernlund currently teaches three sections of Photography 1. Photography students should benefit from both his professional knowledge and practical approach.
Mr. Vernlund has a wealth of experience as a photographer. A 1983 graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology in Professional Photography, Mr. Vernlund was chosen out of 3500 entries to win the 1983 Sinar Bron – Swiss Grand Master award. He went on to take photographs for Armstrong World Industries—a designer and manufacturer of floors, ceilings, and cabinets—for sixteen years.
Traveling around the U.S. and Europe, Mr. Vernlund has photographed many different types of buildings, including houses, offices, museums, inns, factories, and schools, both from the outside and from the inside. He has done work in advertising and, in 1997, received a Master of Management and Business Administration degree from Penn State University.
From 2000 to 2006 he worked on shooting furniture at Filene’s Department Stores. Last October, Architectural Digest chose a picture by Mr. Vernlund of the exterior of “a lakeside home in northern New England,” with lights glowing at dusk, as one of the top ten entries to an open competition it held. He has also done some art prints but says he shoots “primarily architecture.”
Mr. Vernlund first came to Choate last spring, when he photographed paintings of the crisis in the Sudan that were then on exhibition in the Paul Mellon Arts Center. He met Mr. Mellon at the opening of the show, and Mr. Mellon soon chose him as a candidate for the replacement photography teacher. As well as becoming a Choate faculty member, he recently became a grandfather, when his daughter had a baby.
Though Mr. Vernlund now does all his professional photography digitally, the classes he teaches here all deal exclusively with the traditional method involving negatives and a dark-room. Asked about his perspective on learning to take photographs, Mr. Vernlund said that “it’s best learned by doing.” Though his students do have a textbook, they spend most of their time “shooting, looking at each other’s photographs, and talking about them.” Taking photos, Mr. Vernlund added, “should be fun.”
Mr. Vernlund has already enjoyed the responses he has received from his students. “They’re very diverse in terms of backgrounds,” he said, going on to describe his students as “very bright, enthusiastic…punctual! I’m impressed with the maturity of their creative vision. They submitted sophisticated images for their first assignment.”
