![\"One](\"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/41\/2016\/08\/19700410_MR_Mine_S2_web_250x356.jpg\")
Alan Roshak was born in Chicago to Wisconsin natives and moved to Milwaukee at age 8. His father, an optometrist and amateur photographer, had developed film from reconnaissance missions during his World War II service. So the young Roshak learned the nuances of using a camera and, as a teenager, he spent weekends photographing old buildings in Milwaukee slated for the wrecking ball.<\/p>\n
Because most of his relatives had attended UW-Stevens Point, Roshak was expected to do the same. But he finished coursework at South Division High School six months early. So, while waiting for fall semester to attend UWSP, he decided to enroll at UWM for the spring of 1966. He never left.<\/p>\n
Almost immediately, Roshak discovered the student newspaper, the UWM Post. For eight months, he did a comic strip. \u201cThen, one day, the photo editor needed someone to cover an event in the Union,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
But the Plan-A photographer didn\u2019t have a camera with him that day. \u201cI always carried a camera,\u201d Magayne-Roshak recalls, \u201cso I said, \u2018I can do it.\u2019\u201d He doesn\u2019t remember exactly what that first opportunity was, but he\u2019d proved his reliability. His first published photo in the Post was of Ted Sorensen, aide to the late President John F. Kennedy, who was on the UWM campus giving a lecture.<\/p>\n
Over the years, Magayne-Roshak has photographed scores of visiting celebrities \u2013 former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Wisconsin-raised Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell and South African human rights activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He photographed a young Willem Dafoe while the actor was still a UWM student. He estimates he covered 70 UWM commencement ceremonies and took portraits of seven of UWM\u2019s nine chancellors.<\/p>\n
He loves the way a picture\u2019s details can tell a story in the subtlest way. \u201cSome things, you know you\u2019ve got to get a shot of, like someone dressed in a bunny costume crossing the street,\u201d he says. \u201cBut other times, I just wanted to get the picture of something that nobody noticed unless they looked twice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like the well-worn spots on a library floor in front of some public rotary phones, back when such phones were prominent on campus. By the mid-2000s, almost all public phones had disappeared.<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/p>\n Roshak, who hyphenated his last name after his 1970 marriage to former Post reporter Kathryn Magayne, launched his career during a turbulent time at UWM and campuses across the nation. Racial tension and opposition to the Vietnam War bred a stream of public protests, and they were often the focus of his early work. But the atmosphere was rarely so politically and socially charged.<\/p>\n In addition to the usual spate of award ceremonies, speeches and images publicizing academic research, Magayne-Roshak captured the daily lives of several generations of UWM students. He did so as enrollment shot up. In 1956, UWM\u2019s enrollment was 6,195. By 1971, it was more than 22,000. For the 2015-16 school year, the number stood at 27,156.<\/p>\n He was often dispatched to cover celebratory scenes like the one in the Union on Dec. 4, 1967 \u2013 the first time students who were 21 years old could buy beer on campus. His photo shows a TV cameraman filming exuberant youth reveling in the moment, but doing so with school spirit, courtesy of their UWM-branded steins.<\/p>\n Covering sports may not have been his favorite assignment, but he amassed quite a collection anyhow, reminders of a time when UWM\u2019s football team played the University of Illinois-Chicago at Soldier Field. Funding issues contributed to UWM nixing its 75-year-old football program after the 1974 season.<\/p>\n Oft-tight finances didn\u2019t keep UWM from growing into a major research institution and a destination for renowned experts. The internationally recognized Fine Arts Quartet relocated from Chicago\u2019s Northwestern University to UWM in 1963, and Magayne-Roshak has photographed them multiple times.<\/p>\n In 1978, UWM became the new home for the archives of the 127-year-old American Geographical Society, a $30 million collection of rare maps and other historical documents. From atop Enderis Hall, Magayne-Roshak photographed the arrival of a caravan of cargo-laden trucks, which originated in New York and was escorted by state police.<\/p>\n The memories, and photographic evidence of them, go on and on, and Magayne-Roshak took pride in coming up with different ways to present his work. Long before the digital revolution, he had to find old-school solutions to photographic problems, such as manually piecing together images to help faculty document steps in their research.<\/p>\n And there were times when the artistic side of his photography took center stage. He had a fondness for taking \u201cbefore and after\u201d photos of the built environment, not just at UWM, but across the city of Milwaukee. In 2003, he exhibited pictures of disappearing old Milwaukee at a School of Architecture and Urban Planning show called \u201cLess is Less: The 70s \u2013 A Decade of Demolition.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI want to remember things I see exactly as they happened,\u201d he says. \u201cWith the photos I\u2019ve shot, I can always go back and look again \u2013 and remember the details that might have been forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n Even when retirement became reality, he couldn\u2019t quite give up working for UWM, and the school is still benefitting from his store of knowledge. He\u2019s now digitizing many of the thousands of photo slides stored in the Photo Services offices to prevent snapshots of history from being lost or discarded.<\/p>\n He is uniquely qualified for the task.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah,\u201d he quips, \u201cbecause I have a mind like a rusty steel trap.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alan Magayne-Roshak witnessed most of UWM’s six decades through the lens of a camera. As we celebrate the school’s 60th anniversary, meet its visual encyclopedia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":836,"featured_media":36498,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[174],"tags":[250],"section":[127,129],"display_categories":[115,116],"related-coverage":[],"uwmnews-feed":[167,344,158,164],"class_list":["post-36496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-student-success","section-arts-humanities","section-film-fine-arts","display_categories-top-story-secondary","display_categories-top-story-section","uwmnews-feed-alumni-association","uwmnews-feed-arts-architecture","uwmnews-feed-letters-science","uwmnews-feed-arts"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/41\/2016\/08\/19760507_MR_PSOA_5244C_web_300x275.jpg\")