Alex McCauley '26 knew he wanted a creative outlet to balance the three other rigorous classes he was taking when he arrived at Muhlenberg for the fall 2022 semester. So he chose Digital Photography as his fourth class.

That led, eventually, to "From the Backyard," a book of photographs that McCauley had printed by Edition One Books this summer.

"The book is filled with images that come together to show a story of childhood nostalgia, transitioning into adulthood, and lost time," wrote McCauley on a LinkedIn post announcing the book.

The title was inspired by a photo of McCauley, about 5 years old, jumping in the backyard of his grandparents' house, with lots of motion blur, while his grandfather took a picture of him. 

"I love [digital photography], but it's kind of weird just having all your work be on a computer," he says. "It's cool to have a physical representation of my work. I've been thinking about doing this for a long time, and I finally got the spark for it.

"I just really enjoyed that photo," he adds. "And I thought, all right, I should really try to do this now."

McCauley, an economics major and a statistics minor, applied for and received a grant for the Adobe Suite, which he used to narrow down and sequence the photos. It was a more arduous process than he imagined. 

Starting with about 250 low-quality 4x6 CVS prints of his photos, McCauley spent just under a year sorting through the images on large tables and his bedroom floor. He first narrowed the field to about 160, then had a difficult time paring down to the 110 or so that would make the final cut.

"It's really hard," he says. "It's kind of a harsh advice quote from a photography professor of mine, but she was talking about making big projects that you have a bunch of photos in contention for, and she was like, 'You have to kill your babies at some point.' There were some photos that I had an emotional attachment to, and I just had to think about them objectively and how they would fit into the story that I was making. So there's a lot of photos not in the book that I really love."

The book consists of a 250-word introduction, a poem that McCauley wrote, two poems from other Muhlenberg students, and a longer story in the middle about Stony Lick Golf Course in West Virginia that McCauley originally wrote for Depeche Golf, a small European golf magazine.

McCauley, a co-captain on Muhlenberg's men's golf team, added a further nod to the sport with the last photo he added to the collection — "Tobacco Road," which depicts teammate Charlie Kerprich '26 standing on top of a hill at a golf course on the team's spring break trip to North Carolina in May.

The story told in the book is one that makes sense to McCauley, even though he's not sure if readers will understand the meaning.

"College is a big time for emotions and growing up, and not losing childhood but kind of moving on," he explains. "And I just felt like the emotions that the little blurry guy in that photo had were coming to me as I was looking at it. I can't really go back to that, but I can't dwell on it, so I have to try to make the life that I'm living now as good as I remember that child's was."

McCauley's acumen in photography almost comes naturally. His great-uncle Art Shay was a longtime photojournalist whose work was featured in Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, and other national publications. Two of Art's brothers, Lenny and Barry (Alex's grandfather), were also deeply involved in photography, so McCauley's family gatherings as a youngster included lots of clicking cameras. 

McCauley has always liked taking photos, but after starting his classes at Muhlenberg, he says he learned the art behind what photographers look for in terms of lines, shadows, and composition. He's taken introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses in digital photography and had his final project for Advanced Digital Photography displayed in the Center for the Arts in the spring of 2024.

Unlike his relatives, though, McCauley doesn't plan to make photography a career, instead opting for something in the economics field, with photography as an occasional side gig.

"I've talked to a lot of professional photographers, and there's this guy who, it's his job, and even though he still loves it, he said it was really hard almost losing the spark that he had for photography," says McCauley. "He's busy every day and it sometimes keeps him from his family. So having it be an outlet that can sometimes make me money, and I can do in my own time, would be really great."

for a sampling of pictures from McCauley's book, please visit our Instagram @muhl_sports