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The Future is Ours - A solo exhibition of photography and video works

This solo exhibition premiered at Netherlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2 June – 2 September 2012). The Future is Ours, Classroom Portraits sets out 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 twenty-first 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 this solo exhibitions, a globally distributed book produced by a mainstream publisher and numerous features, articles, interviews and reviews across all media platforms.

The series has also been exhibited at: In Camera Galerie, Paris, France (14 February - 23 March 2013); Ministre Éducation Nationale, Paris, France (14 - 22 September 2013); Photo Espana PHE09 / Capilla San Pedro, Cuenca, Spain (6 June - 26 July 2009).

The project has been supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship (2011), British Council, (2009) and the Netherlands Fotomuseum.