This collection covers a wide variety of topics at St. Cloud State University - people, places, events, units, and athletics.  The collection was created from a huge and poorly unorganized mess of photographic prints held in University Archives.  Since the organization of the prints was poor, an artificial order was imposed on them to make more accessible.

Dating mostly from roughly between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, there are no specific creators but it is suspected that the University Photographer took many of the images and that the negatives from them are in the University Photographer collection. If not the University Photographer, the images were likely taken by other university employees for university business. If so, the copyright is held by St. Cloud State University.

Photographic print color snapshots, which date from the last half of the 1990s, are very likely not in the University Photographer Collection. There are images that do date before 1970s, especially mostly of buildings, which date before and after the turn of the 20th century, but are a small majority of the total images. Most images are undated and unidentified - the images were put into an appropriate series. To date the images, one must look at content and decide on an approximate date.

This collection is separated into two groups, then into series. Within those series, some are divided into sub-series when appropriate. The description below applies to both groups of images.

Series 1: Athletics

The series is divided by sport and then by gender, if applicable, within the sport. Nearly all of the images are action, group, and team shots of various sports.

Series 2: Buildings and Spaces

This series contains photographic prints of mostly campus buildings and space. There are some slides that depict locations outside of campus and are not.

This series is divided into three sub-series;

Sub-series 1: General Campus

This sub-series contains slides showing campus by air, campus artwork, mostly outdoors, and campus scenes. Campus scenes show various exterior spots on campus and often contain multiple campus buildings. These images often show people within these spaces, which focus mostly on the space.

Sub-series 2: Specific Campus Buildings and Spaces

Divided by specific campus buildings and space, the images show most often the exterior and, sometimes, the interior of buildings. The slides are sub-divided when appropriate by folder. Some material here show the interior of campus buildings extensively, most notably Centennial Hall as a library (1971-2000), as well as Garvey Commons, and Kiehle as a library (1952-1971). The images show mostly students interacting with the space.

The oversize photographs date before and just after 1900, especially for Old Main, both Lawrence Halls, Riverview, Shoemaker Hall, and the Old Model School.

If there was a specific event associated with a campus building or space, such as groundbreakings, dedications, and cornerstone layings, the slides were placed in this series and not the Social Activities and Events series.

Sub-series 3: Non-campus Buildings and Spaces

There weresome images that showed non-campus spaces, such as downtown St. Cloud, downtown Minneapolis, 10th Street / University bridge, and the neighborhood surrounding the campus as it grew. There are some images that were included here that are now part of campus but when taken were not, such as those that list intersections by street names, and include those homes that stood nearby.  These homes no longer stand.

Series 3: Campus Units and Organizations

This series contains materials related specifically to campus units, including departments, programs, and student groups by name. if there were events specifically associated with a unit, those images appear here, especially those for Learning Resources Services.

Series 4: People

This series focuses mostly on images of students, though there are some images here that are not student related. These students are shown together in groups, walking on campus, participating in class, studying, relaxing in their resident hall rooms, attending athletic events, participating in recreational sports, and as cheeleaders, danceline, or as the Husky mascot.

This series does not contain all images of students but those that were generally identified as students outside of those images that appeared in those related to Centennial Hall and other campus buildings, participating in study-abroad programs, or those depicted in social activities and events.

The oversize images are particularly rich, containing the class composite photos and individual faculty and student protraits, many of which appeared on the composite class photos.

Series 5: Social Activities and Events

Filed in alphabetical order, this series contains slides from specific events such as homecoming, commencement, and registration, to politicians, musical groups, and Hollywood actors. Those folders labeled as "Campus Events" contain images in which the specific event is unidentified.

Series 6: Other

This series contains imagess that did not fit into any of the above categories. Most notable are photo albums from St. Cloud State's centennial celebration as well as the 1975 celebration related to St. Cloud State (and other state four year schools) changing its status from a college to a university.

Series 7: Large Oversize Images

This series contains very large oversize images that could not fit into archival boxes. Due to their size, a separate series was created, but are a small majority of this collection. Particularly notable are the panoramic images from the 1910s and 1920s that featured all students and faculty, usually taken in front of Old Main and Lawrence Hall.

The Alfred Grewe Papers consists of approximately 6,200 photographic 35 mm color slides (with scanned copies) depicting St. Cloud State University classroom and field studies from the 1960s to the 1990s. The slides were scanned by Grewe's former student Mary Stefanski.

In addition to several sets of classroom lectures on key subject matter of his SCSU courses, the image collection includes a significant component of Grewe's’s research with bald eagles. He was one of the first to document the status and habits of eagles prior to their endangered species listing in 1967. As part of this work, Grewe was one of the first to suggest that chemicals in the environment were likely responsible for the critical thinning of eagle egg shells, a major cause of the inability of these birds to reproduce at a rate sufficient to sustain an already much diminished population.

Grewe was also a preeminent authority on American white pelicans, initiating and leading the world’s longest running pelican banding study at Marsh Lake in Lac Qui Parle Wildlife Management Area near Appleton, Minnesota. Here he documented the breeding colony’s rise from two pairs to over 20,000, the largest American white pelican colony in the world for many years.

Other topics documented by the images here include sandhill cranes, owls of various species, great blue herons and other colonial nesting waterbirds, etc. Many wildlife species are depicted, including from his many graduate students' research / theses topics. Images portray Grewe or his students conducting “wildlife work” such as capturing and banding birds, working hunter check stations, conducting radio telemetry, etc. and overviews of habitat restoration practices from Federal wildlife refuges and State wildlife management areas. Several of the previous Grewe students shown in the collection became prominent names in the wildlife arena in future years, something Grewe gave him more pride than anything else he had accomplished.

Original text written on the slides was primarily from Grewe himself. However, many (if not most) of the slides have no written information on them.

The digital scans are organized and named as such (as written by Mary Stefanski):

The image file names include the following format: Group, Slide Number, and any Information written on the slide. Any dates, names, etc. within ( ) were not written on the original slide and were added for clarification from the date printed or embossed on the slide when it was developed. For example: Crex Birds IMAG0065 Injured Cooper Hawk (Owen Schmidt 1971). The original slide can be found within the larger collection in the Crex Meadows Birds folder in slot 65 and contains the writing “Injured Cooper Hawk.” (Owen Schmidt 1971) was added to the electronic file name based on the identification of Owen and the date, 1971, stamped on the cardboard slide holder.