The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild

摘要

This article explores the possible uses of school photographs for developing new histories of education. Two different types of school photographs are discussed with particular relevance to the significance of the representation of the body of the schoolchild. The authors consider how the school photograph, produced within the school for internal private purposes and/or for external community consumption, has acted as a significant means by which school was 'performed' and through which boundaries between the public or institutional world of school and private world of the home and community could be traversed. Photographic albums from the mid-twentieth century of two schools in Portugal are explored within an analytical framework that considers how such sources develop new understandings of how local traditions intersect with transnational cultural norms. The idealized arrangement of the body of the schoolchild is never more clearly demonstrated than in school photography and the authors trace this tradition to the origins of images of the schoolchild found in popular public iconography dating from the late nineteenth century.