Paul Joyce ’77, ’79M.S. started taking pictures the minute he arrived on campus in the fall of 1973.
Joyce worked as a student photographer for The Observer, the Dome yearbook and Notre Dame Magazine, publishing hundreds of images during his years as an undergraduate and graduate student in biological sciences. He took some iconic pictures, including an often-republished snapshot of Mary Blazek ’80 dancing with Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, then Notre Dame’s president, at a 1977 campus picnic. And a photo of Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger ’76 making that famous tackle near the end of the 1975 Notre Dame-Georgia Tech football game.
Shown on these pages are several dozen examples from the photographer’s archive. Joyce, a Massachusetts resident, figures he has about 35,000 photographic negatives from his Notre Dame years and maybe a thousand 8-by-10-inch prints that he made from those images.
He kept those negatives in binders in his basement for decades. During the past year, he combed through and scanned many of them for digital storage. He agreed to share his work with Notre Dame Magazine, and the images we selected are a community photo album of sorts — a window into campus life in the 1970s.
Seen here are athletic events, classroom scenes, Masses, pep rallies, the An Tóstal mud pits, Mardi Gras, the Blizzard of 1978, student clubs and long-vanished campus hangouts, including The Huddle grill in LaFortune Student Center and the old Fieldhouse when it served as studio space for art students. Joyce captured shag carpets, long hair, bell-bottoms, students on rooftops, dining hall meals and celebrity visitors.
He took up photography as a hobby and worked on the yearbook while attending Brother Rice High School in Chicago. He says it felt natural to continue that work in college.
“It wasn’t just me taking pictures,” he says, recalling the four or five other student photographers active during his college years. “We helped each other and pushed each other to be better. It was just a great environment.”
Photography by Paul Joyce, who earned a doctorate in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island and retired in 2021 after a long career in marine science. He now works as a photographer for his local newspaper and teaches photography at a private secondary school.