“Rowland Scherman ’55: Peace, Protest, and Promise”

After graduating from Gunn, Scherman studied photography at Oberlin College and was the first official photographer for the Peace Corps in 1961. He began working as a freelance photographer in 1963 for LIFE magazine, Look, National Geographic, Time, the United States Information Agency, and others. A witness to history, he captured many of the iconic musical, cultural, and political events of the 1960s, including the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, the March on Washington, D.C., and Woodstock. He traveled with U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy during his presidential campaign, toured with Judy Collins, took a road trip with tennis great Arthur Ashe, and was in the studio when Crosby, Stills, and Nash recorded their first album. 

In 1967, Scherman won a Grammy Award for "Best Album Cover, Photography" for his photograph of Bob Dylan, which was used for “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.” Both the Grammy and the photograph, which Scherman took while Dylan was performing at Washington Coliseum in 1966, are featured in the exhibit at Gunn. Scherman's work is archived at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, and featured in the book, “Timeless: Photography of Rowland Scherman,” edited by Michael E. Jones and Christine Jones with a foreword written by Collins. Scherman’s life and work were also the subject of the documentary film, “Eye on the Sixties: The Iconic Photography of Rowland Scherman,” by Chris Szwedo.

“Let us see and feel what it was like to be there.”
To prepare for the exhibit, Gallerist Lincoln Turner spent hours pouring over 2,300 of Rowland Scherman’s images that the UMass Amherst Libraries have catalogued online, and scoured contact sheets of another 1,000 images. Many of them reflect the fact that Scherman often had a front-row seat to the events and people who were making history at that time: the Kennedys, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyondon Johnson, Barbara Walters, and the Beatles. 

When the editors of the United States Information Agency asked him to photograph the March on Washington, they didn’t yet know how big the event would be. “‘Let us see and feel what it was like to be there,’ was what they said they wanted,” the photographer recalled in his essay, “The March Revisited,” published in January. His images are still doing that today. 

Turner, who is in his ninth year of teaching visual arts at Gunn, holds a bachelor’s degree in photography and film production from Ithaca College and a MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, and specializes in 19th century printing processes. He first encountered Scherman in 2022, when he and faculty member Andrew Richards P'20 '23 organized a group show of alumni artists in the Perakos Family Cares Art Gallery. Soon after, Turner began talking with Scherman about having a solo show at Gunn. “I looked him up and his photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono came up. I’ve always loved that portrait. So I sent him an email, and he saw that I was, at that time, the Head Coach of the rowing team. We had a great conversation and I asked him immediately if he would be interested in having a show of his work at school. From there we just kept having conversations.”

“For me in particular, the connection is that I was born the day after JFK’s inauguration. And Rowland has talked about how moved he was by JFK’s inauguration speech, which led him to the Peace Corps,” Turner said, noting the 1960s were a formative period in his own life, and he studied Scherman’s work closely before selecting images for the show. His goal was to use the photographs as a form of storytelling and to create a broader sense of the photographer’s surroundings. “He made some really beautiful photographs. He was good at not just showing the important people speaking, but Rowland had a great eye for showing small moments, details, that were kind of heartwarming and important in their own right.”

Turner credited Caroline White, SCUA Outreach Archivist & Public Services Coordinator at UMass Amherst Libraries, with pulling hundreds of amazing images from The Rowland Scherman Collection for the exhibit. Additional images came from the Still Pictures Branch of the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in East Harwich, Massachusetts, and from Scherman himself.

“I just knew immediately that we needed to have a show of his work. There isn’t any question about it. It’s important work that needs to be seen,” Turner said.

Inspiration for "A Complete Unknown"
A resident of Cape Cod, Scherman continues to be engaged in photography and recently began publishing A Photographer’s Newsletter on Substack. In an entry titled, “Bob Dylan Enters the World,” published in November, Scherman shared the story behind the first portrait he ever made of Dylan, then 19, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, as well as his iconic images of Dylan performing on stage with Joan Baez on what turned out to be the weekend of “his big break.” Fans of the Academy Award-nominated Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” will quickly recognize the camera angles Scherman employed when he made those photographs.

“Just one or two songs into the set, folk superstar Joan Baez pulled up a chair next to Bob and started harmonizing with him. I hadn’t known they were pals, but she sure knew all his songs. The crowd immediately swelled impressively. The harmonies Joan effortlessly and beautifully inserted into Dylan’s songs gave them a gravitas few had heard before,” he wrote.

“I went closer, shot a few frames, stage left, and pretty soon I was on the stage itself, positioning myself behind them. The only reason I wasn’t summarily kicked off the stage, I now assume, was that I had several cameras and appeared to know what I was doing. I couldn’t help myself from trespassing. Sometimes you just know. I knew I was where I ought to be; and I was experiencing some music that was really important,” Scherman said.

“As if on some cosmic cue, the next night, Bob was scheduled for his own spot on the big stage. His afternoon performance the day before had stoked crowd interest in him, and there was indeed a palpable expectation throughout the festival. I will always be amazed how coolly and confidently Dylan handled this, his big break,” he continued. “In one weekend, Bob Dylan had gone from a near unknown to the remarkable, important folk icon he’s been ever since. History was being made. And I was lucky to be there, to make pictures of most of it.”

About the Gallery
The Perakos Family Cares Art Gallery was established in 2020 in the Thomas S. Perakos Arts and Community Center by the building’s namesake donor, Thomas Perakos ’69, his family, and the Class of 1969, in celebration of their 50th reunion and to honor their beloved teacher and coach, Wallace H. Rowe III H’57 P’77 ’79. Recent exhibits have included: “Amplifying Voices: Global Feminism,” a student-curated exhibit featuring 43 works by 24 artists representing different interpretations of feminism (2025);  "Cleve Gray: Towards an Art of Hope," a retrospective exhibition featuring works by American Abstract Expressionist painter Cleve Gray (2024); “Waterfronts and Woodcuts,” featuring work by Don Gorvett, a Boston-born artist acclaimed for his hand-pulled color reduction woodcuts recording maritime subjects (2023); and annual exhibits featuring work in a variety of mediums by student-artists at The Frederick Gunn School. For questions about the gallery, or to express interest in exhibiting work, please email artgallery@frederickgunn.org.

Above: John Lennon and Yoko Ono at a protest, London, August 1971 ©Rowland Scherman. Courtesy of Rowland Scherman and The Rowland Scherman Collection, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.