Andrew Popper – 50th Reunion Essay

Andrew Popper

andrewjpopper@gmail.com

917-576-6133

Spouse(s): Lydia Sigelakis (1997)

Child(ren): William (1998), Rudy (2002)

College: Ezra Stiles

“The essay itself is meant to be a reflection on your life so far.” In other words: Compose before you decompose.

My college years were awkward ones. I happened to “place out” of the freshman composition course, and while others struggled weekly with their “Giamatti paper,” I was the guy asking, “What’s a Giamatti?” It sounded like something akin to a Ferrari or a Maserati.

The isolating architecture of Stiles College allowed me to formulate a reclusive lifestyle in upper class years. I took encouragement from seeing Calvin Hill, who lived in Pierson, also ensconce himself studiously in hermetic Stiles Library. The Stiles ethos wasn’t big on adulating football stars back then, but I was a secret fan. Years later I would learn from Hill himself that Dean Ernest Thompson (our much-loved, rugged New Zealander) had personally invited him there to escape the glare of publicity.

Being socially monastic and undisciplined in writing, I gravitated (or drifted, you might say) into a career in photography, which was often, in those pre-social-media days, a strictly visual and solitary pursuit that suited my mood. To begin with I took Walker Evans’s senior seminar in the Art Department. I made an initial job contact after graduation at the Woodstock Festival, and honed my craft by assisting a variety of New York professionals for a few years.

In due course I succumbed to some innate journalistic urge and became a freelance newspaper and news-magazine photographer, working throughout the 1980s both here and abroad, and then as a photo editor for US News and World Report and Business Week. Freelancing was a challenging way of life, which I found intellectually and spiritually rewarding; I was peer and competitor with many renowned and talented photojournalists, and collaborated with distinguished writers. All the while, though, I considered myself merely a journeyman in the trade—but with few regrets, I hasten to add.

More recently I’ve been a family guy, and also—unashamedly—technologically unemployed, through the vagaries of the media business. So, for close to a decade I’ve been the mainstay parent-of-two in our house (a modest Manhattan apartment) while my wife Lydia works long hours as an attorney representing labor unions. At the time of writing this quasi-obituary, a year before the reunion, our younger son is reaching the age of college-application essays; where have you gone, Bart Giamatti? As for my own journalistic interests, they’ve never waned, and I continue to do projects and assignments as they arise.

Yale was enjoyable at times, though I suffered mightily from lack of co-education. Certainly there were redeeming features: the teachers (Scully, Spence, and Sennett spring to mind); the music (shout-out to David Friend, who clued me in to singing in paid church choirs); and at least one lifelong friendship.

No deep philosophical musings here. For my epigram I credit Snoopy—he of the Epicurean school—who wisely intoned, “Sure there are other things I could be doing. But being a dog is a full-time job.”