Figure 1.-- found that when we first arrived at the various schools that the children were at first drawn to the camera and wanted to act out and mug. After a few snaps we found the novelty wore off and we could begin our candid assessments of the schools. |
The photographs here were taken by the authors, except for the historical photographs in the chronological section. You may notice that many of the photographs are not technically perfect. Here the choice was between technical perfection and realism. We are sure that teachers and former pupils will see this and our other schoolnpublications as very realistic depictions of school life. This is in large measure because the idea of the project was take candid photographs showing the children and teachers going about their normal everyday activities. By candid we do not mean that the children were unaware of us, but that the photographs were not formal portaits in which the children were especially dressed up and posed. Setting up photographs in classrooms would have not only been disruptive, but would not shown class activities as they actually occurred. The same is essentially the case of the freetime photographs, only here we had a little more flexibility to make minor changes so that we were not, for example, shooting into the sun. The children were very interested in our project and anxious to be photographed. Here we did a little posing to get interesting backgrounds or to take photographs in small groups. Also the children may many suggestions to us about where to take photographs of interesting activities or good views of the school, grounds, and facilities. We found that the children especially liked to be photographed with friends so we often took smll group rather than single photographs. Even with the free time photographs, however, the photographs are primarily candid shots. Thus what you see here are the schools as they were operating on a normal day.
