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Classroom Portraits - A book of photographic works from schools from across the world

Published by Prestel, this book contains Classroom Portraits from UK, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Cuba, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Hungary, Russia, Bangladesh, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, Ethiopia, Nigeria, USA, Taiwan, Japan.

Classroom Portraits sets out to examine the shared social and cultural experience of school in a straightforward, non-judgmental way. It is an attempt to create an international typological record of the school environment and of the children and adolescents who are experiencing it in the early part of the 21st century.

Group portrait photographs made with a specialist large format camera form the basis of the work. The high definition images record a wealth of visual information allowing the people and places depicted to be scrutinised in a way that is unique to the process. More than 450 portraits have been made in more than 100 schools, with accompanying statistics (gathered from questionnaires) which offer additional layers of information about what the pupils think and feel. Since 2011, a series of Classroom Video Portraits has also been produced, which address an additional set of questions about the nature of photographic portraiture, the moving image and the experience of ‘being photographed’.

This work has been disseminated internationally via solo and group exhibitions in major museums, and numerous features, articles, interviews and reviews across all media platforms.

Hardback, 208 pages, 87 colour photographs, essay by Dr. Leonid Illyushin, design by Way Not Associates.