Notre Dame of Maryland students recreate 99-year-old photos

Shakespeare’s works have been performed for centuries, including on the campus of Notre Dame of Maryland University dating back at least 100 years. To honor that history, the Baltimore school dusted off some photographs from its archives and reimagined them for the modern day.

The cast of NDMU’s production of the Shakespearean comedy “As You Like It” joined forces with a class of digital photography students to recreate 99-year-old images of their predecessors, with the results now on display in an online exhibit.

Dr. Kate Bossert, the school’s drama coordinator and an associate professor of English, had spent part of a 2019 sabbatical researching NDMU’s history of all-female theater casting. In the archives, she discovered photographs of a 1923 performance of “As You Like It” that she found striking.

“There was this really stunning image in a wooded area on campus of these actors in their Shakespearean costumes acting out a scene,” Bossert said. “In the process of looking for more records, we found more images of outdoor theater, which was a hallmark of the drama program in the early decades of the 20th century on campus.”

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic put live theater on hold, and when the drama department resumed, it stuck to unadorned staged readings. As Bossert and local director Ann Turiano began brainstorming how to produce their first full production since 2020, the idea of an open-air show that added to NDMU’s legacy of “theater in the meadow” gained even more appeal.

Bossert also connected with art chairman Geoff Delanoy and shared her vision of recreating the 1923 photos with her cast.

“Geoff’s approach is that rephotography as an art form allows us to kind of put the historical and the contemporary side by side and reflect on cultural changes,” Bossert said.

Delanoy’s digital photography class split into teams that were each assigned two photos to recreate. Angelina Moree, who played the show’s heroine, Rosalind, and her castmates spent a day in March posing for the photography students.

Moree, a 20-year-old sophomore biology major from Runnemede, N.J., recalled one shot that featured the full cast.

“One of the things they told us was, ‘Take your character to the extreme. What would they do?’ and everything like that,” Moree said. “It really brings out how funny and comical and all over the place this (show) was.”

Students scouted their own locations on campus, in some cases matching the exact setting of a photo from 1923. Sophie Rotmark, a senior art therapy major, said her team aimed to stay as faithful as possible to the original pictures, while other groups took more liberties for a modern-day interpretation. The choice was up to them.

The drama department put on “As You Like It” in early April to great reviews, though rain pushed many of the performances indoors. One then-and-now photo recreation was featured in the digital playbill for the show while the photography class stayed busy editing the rest.

“When I first started this photography class I was terrified because I had struggled just getting pictures taken,” said Rotmark, 46, from Newark, N.J. “Now I’m very comfortable behind the camera and I can actually edit photos where I can be proud of and get good reviews on. We’ve come such a far way, from where we first started the semester to where most of us are right now.”

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