The Pennsylvania State University will showcase the work of alumnus photographer Pat Little in an exhibition titled "The Way I Saw It."

Little, who studied at Penn State before building his career behind the camera, returns to his alma mater with a body of work that spans his years as a working photographer. The exhibition's title — pointedly personal — frames the show as a retrospective of one photographer's way of seeing rather than a survey of any single subject or assignment.

For a university gallery, presenting the work of a graduate carries a double function. It honours an alumnus, certainly, but it also puts a working photographer's accumulated output in front of the students who follow him — images made in the field, on deadline, by someone who once sat where they sit now.

The university's announcement gives little away about the selection itself, which leaves the strongest claims to the title. "The Way I Saw It" promises a first-person account in pictures: not the events as they happened, but as one photographer framed, cropped and chose them. That distinction is the oldest argument in documentary photography, and it is the argument the exhibition invites viewers to have.

Penn State has not yet announced the exhibition's opening date, venue details or public programme. Those specifics, when they come, will determine whether "The Way I Saw It" reads as a full retrospective or a tighter editorial selection — and how much of Little's eye the university is prepared to hang on its walls.