Dutch photographer Raimond Wouda's deceptively simple monograph School was taken from a five-year long project that focussed on secondary schools in the Netherlands. He decided early not to photograph inside classrooms, and instead trained his large-format camera (propped high on a ladder) and complex flash system on spaces where students interacted between and after classes: cafeterias, auditoriums, lockers, and finally school dances. The resulting work is a more subtle and challenging book than it first appears.
School pictures are an iconic part of any culture, and Wouda’s vividly colored (not for nothing does Martin Parr contribute the introduction) teenscapes are immediately appealing. But this is not your ordinary coming of age survey. The students seldom interact with the camera, which, as Parr notes, is something of an accomplishment. At an age when self-consciousness is the rule, you expect young faces mugging for the lens - and perhaps these were edited out of the final selection. The resulting distance gives School its strange fly-on-the-wall atmosphere - as if these images were selected from saturated and highly detailed surveillance camera footage.
The work recalls Jacques Tati’s cinematic masterpiece Playtime — which announces itself as an study of leisure but turns a strangely distant eye on its subject. Tati’s alter-ego Mr. Hulot wanders through Playtime, as he does through most of the director’s works, observing life at a distance, a cog in the lives he encounters, but never close enough to truly relate. The students’ lack of interaction with the camera opens up a chilling possibility: that you are seeing their world through the eyes of someone who can never be part of their world. Is this the lot of the photographer?
Contrast this work with Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s fascinating portraits of adolescents, subjects who directly face the camera in varying levels of teenage self-consciousness and curiosity. Wouda's subjects go on as if he's not there. But each approach can be revealing in its own way, and Wouda's group shots especially reward close viewing. Although I have mixed feelings about the gallery trend towards ever larger prints, these detailed images would be a revelation if printed to life scale.
Article comments
1 - jude folly
when i think of photography and 'deceptively simple,' william eggleston comes to mind; however, the american's approach strikes me as decidedly anthropological.
the automated, 'surveiling' method of image capture provokes questions about the objectivity of such an approach. i'm inclined to see in the photographer an aspiration toward omnipotence; a creator who sees his subjects 'unfig-leafed' by their self-conscious interface with the camera.
2 - Pat Padua
Eggleston is my man - deceptively simple is right but there's often a sinister undercurrent to his anthrpological studies. It's something I find in Memphis itself, open yet a little eerie.
Omnipotence is an interesting way to put the photographic approach - I did not take my analysis there but for those who believe in a Divine eye there's some of that in Wouda's edit.