Photographer SHAUGHN CRAWFORD calls his assignment to shoot L.A. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts in Dodger Stadium “a true pinch-me moment.” Crawford was impressed by the former UCLA baseball star’s humility, generosity and kindness. But it wasn’t Crawford’s first brush with Dodger greatness: As a baseball-obsessed youngster, he attended L.A.’s Reggie Smith Academy, where he met Dodger blue all-stars such as Mike Piazza and Raúl Mondesí, as well as legends like Steve Garvey. Although he worked solo on this production, Crawford typically collaborates with his business partner, John Dubois. Together, as “Shaughn and John,” they approach photography and directing with a documentary sensibility. Some of their most recognized projects include “Sisters of the Valley (The Weed Nuns)” and “Paws for Life,” a series documenting a dog-training program inside a maximum-security prison.
As the executive editor of Popular Mechanics, DAVID DUNBAR often spearheaded coverage of engineering solutions to challenges in the developing world — which made him the ideal choice to tackle our story on how Bruins around the globe are meeting those challenges today. “What intrigued me about the UCLA chapter of Engineers Without Borders was how a campus organization, with its unavoidable churn of graduating students, could manage projects that in some cases extend over years in far-flung parts of the world,” says Dunbar, whose work has also appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, Playboy, Outside and Travel + Leisure. One key reason for the program’s success? “The enduring interest of the club’s alumni,” he says, “who often go on to civil and other engineering careers and still find time to act as mentors and advisors to undergrads on projects that in some cases the alums had initiated years earlier.”
“I loved that this was a story about the power of connection — how a physician who has contributed to research that’s transformed treatment for a serious pediatric cancer saw the potential in a 9-year-old patient and ultimately inspired her to follow in his footsteps as a pediatric oncologist,” says DAN GORDON ’85 about his tender profile in this issue of Bruin Tae-León Butler and the doctor who both saved her life as a child and put her on the path to her own career in medicine. A longtime contributor to UCLA Magazine, Gordon has also written for such publications as Men’s Fitness, Glamour and the Los Angeles Times. Tae’s journey, he says, is “a reminder that beyond UCLA’s prowess in advancing medicine through painstaking research in the laboratory and technological breakthroughs in the clinic, there are countless stories of humanity that are every bit as impressive and impactful.”
Denver-based photographer MICHAEL HAUG shot our pictorial feature on midcentury fashion designer extraordinaire Bonnie Cashin, whose archive resides in UCLA Library Special Collections. To highlight the Cashin aesthetic, a stunning model donned pieces from the personal collection of Cashin scholar Stephanie Lake, which share characteristics with items contained in the Special Collections archive. Haug called collaborating on these images “a true honor,” adding, “I love the historical context of the pieces.” Haug’s clients include Target, Sears, Nike, 3M, Mall of America, the Minnesota Lynx and the Minnesota Timberwolves. He also shoots for a variety of local and national publications.
A pioneer of American sportswear design, Bonnie Cashin was a peer of such style luminaries as Perry Ellis and Bill Blass, but she never got her proper due. That’s about to change, thanks to decorative arts historian and jewelry designer STEPHANIE LAKE. Lake, consulting with the Cashin estate, selected UCLA Library Special Collections as the permanent home of the Cashin archive “because of its ability to position the designer’s work within a broader intellectual and cultural context.” The author of Bonnie Cashin: Chic Is Where You Find It (Rizzoli), Lake takes us on a visual tour of the late designer’s clothes, sketches and artifacts in this issue to reveal a key chapter of missing fashion scholarship. “Just as Bonnie surrounded herself with the work of her intellectual heroes,” Lake says, “I realized that UCLA’s departments and programs — from Armenian studies to digital humanities, from the magazine to its museums — are a prism through which her papers can best inform a reimagining of convention and the pursuit of independent thought, regardless of the field of endeavor.”
CHERIL SANCHEZ captured images of renowned historian and visual artist Nell Irvin Painter M.A. ’67 in Painter’s New Jersey home studio for our feature on the UCLA alumna. For Sanchez, Painter’s story exhibits how Bruins “continue producing meaningful work long after graduation, and how UCLA works to spotlight individuals who are still shaping culture and thought on their own terms.” She says photographing people in their own space, where they do their thinking and creating, feels “special.” Sanchez, of Dominican heritage and raised in the Bronx, has shot for publications and corporate clients that include British Vogue, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Google, Pinterest and Nike. Her recent personal series “On Motherhood: Single Matriarchs” pays homage to Black and Latina single mothers and was inspired by her own upbringing.
