Summer 2008: Emory’s 163rd Commencement

Leaving Campus

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Nora Kleinman 08C (right), who created the photo essay “Graduation” about the weeks leading up to her and her classmates’ commencement ceremonies at Emory on May 12, was born and raised in the small suburban town of Warren, New Jersey. She came to Emory as a freshman in 2004, where she helped to create the student-run Culinary Club (“It’s All About Options,” Winter 2007) and participated in Outdoor Emory, the College Curriculum Committee, and the Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team (Luna). At various times during her college career she worked as a research assistant in comparative literature, a laboratory assistant in a psychiatry lab, an intern at a residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, and an intern in the environmental health branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She spent the spring of her sophomore year on the Emory Tibetan Studies program in Dharamsala, India. She graduated in 2008 summa cum laude with a major in Asian Studies and a minor in Religion. She spent the summer after graduation in Chalenko, Ethiopia, with Learning Enterprises, teaching English to seventh– through eleventh–grade students.

“I owe much of my love of photography to my father, Joel Kleinman,” she says. “Depending on my mood he can be described either as a camera enthusiast, or the crazy guy who has a camera permanently glued to his hand. Even though I was sometimes frustrated by a life constantly recorded—especially during those awkward teenage years—I grew to appreciate the ability to catch a moment or an emotion on film.”

Kleinman created the black and white series “Graduation,” as the final project for her Photography I class, which she took the second semester of her senior year. “It is an attempt to catch on film all of the contradictory emotions associated with leaving Emory and school and stepping out into the world,” she says. “I have no memories before my school years, and so this move from the world of classes and exams to the world of jobs and paychecks is the most drastic change I have yet to experience. The photo essay was also an attempt to capture the people and the places that I leave behind in a medium more stable than my memory.”