News
Capturing the Many Faces of Europe
Amanda Gianfrancesco was standing under a shower of rose petals falling from the top of the Pantheon in Rome.
Gregory Spear was searching the winding, intricate passageways of Venice for a sign of the city’s glorious past.
Nicole Malick was on a dirt road in Transylvania – home to impoverished gypsy families.
The three Rutgers University students responded to their disparate settings in the same way: They pulled out their cameras and clicked away, capturing some of the beauty, poverty and historical sweep of Europe.
And last week, back in New Brunswick, their work was getting recognition. The students were the top three winners in a photography contest sponsored by Rutgers Study Abroad and the Rutgers Center for European Studies.
The contest was open to any student who participated in a Study Abroad program in Europe over the last year. More than 30 students submitted entries.
Gianfrancesco, a senior, won first place for her shimmering “Rose Petals Falling Through the Pantheon’s Oculus.” She took the picture just after a Roman Catholic Mass that marked Pentecost. In a symbol of the resurrected Christ instructing the Disciples, thousands of petals are dropped inside the Pantheon from the opening, or oculus, at the top.
“It was such an incredible experience,” said Gianfrancesco,
who is double majoring in art history and psychology. “You’re in this huge,
circular structure and there are thousands of roles petals falling.”
Spear’s second-place “Venice” captured a faded but still imposing building far from the tourist spots in the City of Canals.
“As a history major, I thought it summed up Venice,” said Spear, a senior. “It showed the city’s past as an economic powerhouse that has been reduced to this fragile shell of what it once was.”
Malick, a graduate student in the School of Social Work, took third place with “Television” – a picture of the flimsy huts of the gypsies of Romania, and the power lines that bring television into their dwellings.
“They’re not pretty buildings, but I think the most beautiful things in the world are found in the ugliest things,” Malick said. “Immediately you walk in and it’s warm and the mother is cooking; it smells wonderful, and a child is there.”
R. Daniel Kelemen, director of the Center for European Studies, said the contest was aimed at encouraging students to use visual arts to express their study abroad experience to a larger audience.
And, the contest also helped raise awareness of the center, which over the last several years has shifted focus, changed location and installed a new director.
Initially known as The Center for Russian, Central, and East European Studies, the center adopted its current name in 2006 in response to Europe’s increasing integration. It recently moved from the College Avenue Campus to 102 Nichol Avenue on the Douglass Campus.
The center offers a major and minor, promotes the interdisciplinary study of modern Europe across the university, and sponsors visiting scholars, lectures, conferences, and community outreach.
“The center has evolved,” said Kelemen, an associate professor of political science who was named the center’s director last July. “The focus has shifted to embrace European studies both western and eastern.”
The contest winners were announced at an Oct. 22 reception at the center. All the entries were displayed through multimedia presentations, while the winners were presented with framed 8-by-10 copies of their work. The work was judged by a five-member panel that included both faculty and staff employees.