Boston has more colleges and universities per square mile than almost anywhere in the country, and most of them market themselves with the same photograph: a diverse group of students walking across a quad in golden light, one of them laughing. New York’s universities do the same thing with a subway entrance in the background.

I’ve photographed colleges and universities across Massachusetts, New York, and New England for admissions, communications, and advancement offices. The problems in higher education photography are different from the ones at independent schools, and they’re mostly problems of scale.

The campus is too big to photograph in a day, so nobody tries

An independent school can be photographed in a day. A university can’t, so university photography gets broken into departmental one-offs: the engineering school books a shoot, then the nursing school, then admissions. Each one is competent. None of them add up to a picture of the university.

The fix is to plan campus photography as a series across the academic year, with one photographer, so there’s a consistent point of view and the archive grows into something coherent. Most university communications offices already have the budget for this; it’s just being spent by six different departments who don’t talk to each other.

Faculty are the story and they’re never in it

University marketing photography leans hard on students because students are what the admissions office sells. But the thing that actually distinguishes one university from another is who teaches there and what they’re working on. Research labs, studios, clinics, fieldwork, a seminar with eight people around a table.

These are harder to photograph. They require coordinating with faculty who don’t answer email, working around grant-funded equipment, and sometimes signing a confidentiality agreement. They’re also the images that advancement and press offices can’t get enough of, and the ones that tell a prospective graduate student anything real.

Events get photographed; daily life doesn’t

Every university has commencement, convocation, homecoming, and the ribbon cutting for the new building covered. Almost none of them have a good photograph of what a Tuesday in February looks like. The dining hall at 7pm, the library at midnight before finals, the graduate students in the lab on a Saturday. That’s the campus most students actually live in, and the one their parents want to see.

If you run a university communications office, the highest-value photography day you can book is one with no event on it.

Releases are handled inconsistently

Independent schools have a clear opt-out list. Universities are murkier. Most rely on posted notice in public spaces and releases for anyone featured prominently, but the policy varies by campus, by school within the campus, and sometimes by who you ask. Sort this out before the photographer arrives, and give them a one-page summary of what they can and can’t do. It saves a day of images sitting unused because nobody’s sure whether they’re cleared.

The brand guidelines are for designers, not photographers

University brand guides are thorough about typography and color and say almost nothing useful about photography beyond “authentic” and “diverse.” A campus photographer can’t shoot to “authentic.” They can shoot to “we want the engineering school to look like people building things with their hands, not people looking at screens,” or “our campus is in the middle of the city and we want that visible in every frame.”

Give the photographer a paragraph about what the university is trying to say, and the images will say it.

What a good university photograph looks like

It’s specific to the institution. It shows real work or real life rather than a performance of them. It’s made in the light the campus actually has. And it looks like it belongs in a series with the last one, because someone planned it that way.

Evan Scales is a higher education and independent school photographer based in Boston, photographing colleges and universities in Massachusetts, New York City, and across the Northeast for admissions, communications, and advancement.