Through the lens of Veronica Adrover we have seen buildings rise, graduates cheer and lasers glow. We’ve seen governors, a First Lady and a former U.S. president. We’ve glimpsed a young bobcat in tall grass and celebrated young Bobcats in labs, corridors and classrooms.
Through 20 years at UC Merced, Adrover and her camera documented the emergence of a 21st century research university and the people who work, learn and teach there. She is among the most recognized folks on campus, due in part to the Canon EOS at her side but more for the impression she makes on the people whose lives she touches.
Veronica was one of the first staff members I met at UC Merced,” public health Professor Sidra Goldman-Mellor said. “Her warmth, gentle humor and consummate professionalism immediately stood out.”
Adrover is retiring from UC Merced in May, dropping the curtain on a career that began in February 2005 when she became an administrative assistant for the university’s communications team. It was a time when the San Joaquin Valley campus existed more on blueprints than in concrete and steel. Cranes and bulldozers dominated a site six months from hosting its first undergraduate classes.
“Veronica never hesitated to put on a hardhat and boots and walk into a construction zone,” said Patti Waid, the communications director at the time. “She came to work every day with a can-do attitude.”
In 2009, Adrover was among a crew of photographers who captured one of the most remarkable events in UC history: First Lady Michelle Obama’s appearance on campus to give the keynote address for the university’s first four-year graduating class. Thousands packed the commencement grounds, contending with tight security and triple-digit weather.
“She met with the students who arranged the campaign to get her out here and gave them all hugs,” Adrover said. “In the midst of that crazy chaos and hot day she looked so elegant and was as cool as a cucumber.”
Adrover formed a friendship with television anchor Lester Holt, who came to UC Merced ahead of Obama’s appearance to do a piece for NBC and returned to the San Joaquin Valley in 2010 as the spring commencement speaker.
“By the second year, we were buddies,” Adrover said. “Every night when I watched him on the news, it would be like, ‘Hey, Lester.’”
Over the years, Adrover and her camera were on hand for campus visits by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, author and environmentalist Winona LaDuke, and California governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gavin Newsom.
The campus visit that made the biggest impression on Adrover was that of former President Jimmy Carter, who came in 2010 to accept the Spendlove Prize and speak to the National Park Institute. At a small get-together before the Spendlove ceremony, the nation’s 39th president gave the campus photographer a hug.
“That was pretty special,” Adrover said. “A genuine, heartfelt, compassionate person.”
The communications team needed pictures of construction work and of UC Merced’s pioneering faculty and staff for its website and publications. Adrover’s hand shot up. She knew her way around a camera thanks to an associate’s degree in photography from San Francisco City College.
The task was hers. Adrover added “photographer” to her duties but kept her original job description. In UC Merced’s formative period it was common to wear multiple hats.
A longtime colleague said the same about Adrover. A couple of years ago, Lorena Anderson, senior editor in Public Relations, spent two months in a hospital. Adrover visited Anderson every day, providing kindnesses like cleaning Anderson’s glasses or cooling her face with a washcloth.
“I don't know what I would have done without her,” Anderson said, “and I can never adequately thank her.”
In 2013, at age 60, Adrover shed her administrative assistant title and became UC Merced’s official, full-time photographer.
Space for classrooms, offices and labs is a precious commodity on any campus. In the late 2010s, UC Merced’s communications team was headquartered in a business park a few miles from the university. Adrover, who often had several assignments a day at the university, needed an on-campus site to store her gear and set up a computer for photo editing and archiving.
She carved out an unofficial campus hideaway thanks to a long friendship with Professor Mark Aldenderfer, a revered anthropologist and archaeologist. Aldenderfer’s third-floor lab was filled with ceramic fragments, stone tools, field books and notes from expeditions to Tibet and Nepal. With the professor’s blessing, Adrover set up a workstation there, in a sunlit corner framed by tall windows that overlooked Scholars Lane.
“That meant a lot to me,” she said.
“It just seemed like the right thing to do,” said Aldenderfer, now a professor emeritus who departed UC Merced in 2020. “I appreciated her always-cheerful attitude toward her work and the people she met while doing it.”
Over the decades Adrover and her camera captured the pulse of a research institution, photographing labwork, classrooms and field studies. UC Merced, nested in a vast grassland, fed Adrover’s fondness for nature and led to countless images of blooms and wildlife, including a bobcat cub she saw hiding near the campus canal in 2008.
Adrover perfected the art of putting subjects at ease and of disappearing into an event’s margins to frame the ideal moment. You might see her lean her compact frame against a stage or drop to one knee for the best angle. Or she’s in front of you, crisply arranging people for a group shot.
All of these tactics needed time to develop in someone who describes herself as an introvert.
“This job required me to go into situations I would normally be uncomfortable in. I would have to walk in front of a crowd and do what I had to do to get my pictures. That was a challenge. Sometimes it still is,” Adrover said.
“The calm and gentle manner with which she presents herself makes her very approachable,” said longtime UC Merced staff member Tamela Adkins, Protective Services business operations manager. “I will miss her terribly.”
“The calm and gentle manner with which she presents herself makes her very approachable."
