The Josephinum Review, May 1963: a photo essay on the long last days of seminary life

The Long Last Days before the Priesthood
Story for Schools End

Text written and photographs cast, designed, and produced
by Jack Fritscher
Photographic equipment by John Boltz

The Long Last Days before the Priesthood is a photo essay Jack Fritscher published in The Josephinum Review in May 1963, the “Story for Schools End” that closed the school year at Pontifical College Josephinum in Ohio. Fritscher wrote the text and cast, designed, and produced the photographs himself, with photographic equipment by John Boltz.

The essay is a visual meditation on the long last days of seminary life, the final stretch before a young man goes forward to the priesthood. It was the first interior photo-spread feature in the Review, and it sits in this archive beside his other Catholic press writing for the Review, The Torch and other Catholic magazines.

The Long Last Days Photo Spread

The story ran in The Josephinum Review on May 22, 1963, on pages 4-5, as a two-page story-board photo spread. Fritscher shot and designed it around a 60-line poem of his own, and it includes 12 original black-and-white photographs, with film developing credited to John Boltz. The poem begins: “To think my body will yet move like a man. To think I will eat and breathe and grow old in the human humiliation…”

The Josephinum Review was a tabloid-size publication printed in Worthington, Ohio, and this spread, with its poem and its twelve photographs, was a new kind of feature for its pages. Among the pictures are a portrait of a Nigerian prince and a swimming-pool scene of a blond man floating, his face like a water lily.

Both pages of the original spread are reproduced below. For more photographs from Fritscher’s seminary years, visit the Josephinum Photo Gallery.