Crimson and Gold Connection; Malcom Turner

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection. I am Dustin Traver, and today's guest has been a long time fixture at Pittsburgh State University, former master photographer for PSU Malcolm Turner. Malcolm, thank you for coming in today. You're welcome. You retired after 30 years of work here at Pittsburgh State University in June. So congratulations on the spin that much time here and congratulations on retirement. Well, thank you. It's been an honor to work at PSU. And we were talking a little bit before here before we started recording that you have a lot of great memories. Retirement fits you and doesn't fit you at times. That's very true. And that there's some times that you're at events like, oh, I don't have to take pictures now. And then there's some times that, well, I kind of missed that. Well, you know, in time, my wife pointed out to me. She says, she realized that in all the time that you've worked at PSU, I've never gone to a football game with you. And of course, the reason is I'm always working at the football game. And you didn't make her carry your equipment or anything? No, not sideline, no, I wasn't going to do that.

But it was an interesting thing. I never really thought about it. And all those things that you do in the evenings and everything for the job and not that she couldn't have gone, that it's not something that she would have wanted to go to while I was working. So it was kind of an interesting comment, you know. And it'll be even more interesting now to figure out, well, are we going to go to games? Or are we going to do all that, you know? I mean, my wife has so many things to do. Who knows what they'll be? She'll keep you busy. She'll keep me busy, she will. Now, one of the main reasons we have you in here today is you actually have an exhibit at the Bicknell Center. And this has been going on since October now. And it will be there for the foreseeable future anyway, for a while. And we invite anyone to see, this is basically your life's work at Pittsburgh State University. Well, it's a compilation of the last 11 years.

You know, to go back over everything back in the days when we had negatives and everything would have been very tedious and would have been hard to do. So what I did was I went back about 11 years total. Those were all digital files. And the question was always been asked to me before as well. How did you figure out which pictures you were going to choose? And you only have so much space and so much time. And to give you an idea of overall in 30 years time, there's been well over maybe a couple of 100,000 photographs. Wow. And those are probably the good ones that you kept, not the ones you used to wrap. Yeah, those are all the ones you should shoot. But all the way back from back, we were shooting negatives to back digital. And then that kind of number range. But you have to realize that in the film days,

you shot a role film and that was it. And in the digital days, you might go to a football game and you might shoot 11 or 1200 photographs. Yeah. Then you can just pick which one you want. Pick what you want. That we always saved everything. Because we never knew when we might need X player doing something or that kind of thing. Sure. But I started out looking at about the last 10 years. In the last 10 years, my first call as I went through looked at images was a little over 200 that I liked. And I really liked these pictures I really liked. And I, of course you can't do that. That's way too many. So then I went back and I went through and I called them again. So then I had them down 250. And then the final work through, when I finally looked through everything, I picked 72 images out of that. And that's what's in the show. And there are all sizes.

And that room is a fairly big room. It's huge. It's the, I think the largest wall is 110 feet long or something like that. The ceilings go very tall. Very tall. I'd say, well, 15, 18 feet. You can put big, big displays in the area. It's a beautifully well set exhibition area with very good lighting now. It flows very freely. And you can do just a multitude of things, which makes it very unique. And it's very unique to the center out here, in the Bicknell Center. And by the way, I should, and I need to put this plug in here. None of this, this is just an idea. None of it would have been possible without the help of impacts who printed every image. Yes.

And that's a lot of images. Yeah, and then the quality work. And they're one of our underwriters here. We've been blessed with that. So, and that just enhances the product there because you obviously have a great talent for what you've done over the years and to have them help you out. I know that exhibit looks awesome. And then the other part of it was that it was interesting to me, as we were all sitting down around the table talking about, well, this is what we have. This is what we're looking at, which pictures and I said, well, you know, it's going to, if we just put 16 by 20s all around this big room, it's going to look awfully small, you know? Oh, he said, oh, no, no, no, it won't do that. We'll do something big. Yeah, and you know, we ended up putting, see, they're 20 by 30, so 40 by 60s and composite images and even one larger than that that's on the main wall. Now, the people that want to see this exhibit, when can they go? You can go to see the exhibit anytime between eight and 430 Monday through Friday. And this is one of the first exhibits in that building.

It is the first exhibit, yes, the first one. Once the exhibit is over, what is going to happen to these prints? The, when the exhibit is complete, the prints are going to be utilized in order to help students on campus through a scholarship of some type. I'm very good. Anyone interested can go to the Bicknell Family Center for the Performing Arts and See Your Work. Malcolm Turner, thank you so much for coming in and talking to us here on Crimson and Gold Connection and congratulations on the 30 plus years of awesome work that you've done here at Pittsburgh State University. I know you're retired, but I'm sure we'll probably see some more of your work in the near future just as I know it's in your soul right now. It's been a long time. You start thinking about it. By the way, and I should mention that the name of the show is just images. Images by Malcolm Turner. Congratulations and thanks again for coming in on the Crimson and Gold Connection.

You're welcome.