With today’s ubiquitous digital cameras and online photo albums, photography is now as easy and common as sending email. But it is less common for someone to truly make a photograph. The creation of a photograph requires more than aiming the camera in the general direction of your partying friends or the view outside your hotel window and pressing the shutter. It goes beyond finding a controversial or emotionally loaded subject and slapping it onto the film, and it is not enough to master the nuances of aperture and focal length, contrast and color balance.

What it takes to really make a photograph is a combination of all these activities and something more, something that allows the photographer to transform the light coming through the lens into a meaningful image. It is hard to say what exactly that something is. But it can happen to anybody, as long as they have a camera in hand and eyes open.

The Gaze is a student photography organization that strives to celebrate this aspect of photography and share the best student work with the Yale and New Haven community. We publish one issue of the magazine each semester and distribute them freely in dining halls, libraries, and local businesses. We also host exhibitions of student work and presentations by Yale faculty on photography in the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art.

These activities would not be possible without the generous support of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale Undergraduate Organization Funding Committee, Jonathan Edwards College, and our advertisers.

We invite you to enjoy the works featured here and encourage you to take part in subsequent exhibitions, activities and publications.