Come to Beautiful Ruston: A Wonderful Place to Live

Come to Beautiful Ruston is a photographic essay about a college town in north central Louisiana. As a Louisiana Tech student from 1961 to 1965, the author worked as a photographer in the journalism department, and contributed photos to the Lagniappe yearbook, Tech Talk newspaper, Ruston Daily Leader newspaper and other publications. This booklet was a one-off, a creative whim, filmed on a weekend after enlisting friends as models. After graduation the thin volume followed the author in moves from Louisiana to Texas, Massachusetts, California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Massachusetts. The cover gained a scar from a hot coffee cup, and the pages were wrinkled, having survived a flooded basement. Most of the time the booklet stayed on a shelf, and was occasionally taken down and examined. As the author got older, the photograph’s captions seemed increasingly sophomoric, and downright cynical - the product of a bored student poking fun at a quite-nice college town. Then one day he realized the booklet was a half-century old, and that the photographs might be of interest. Surely Ruston had changed in fifty years. A few modern notes complement the photographs.