The school photograph, together with other images
typical from our childhood, represents a period of our lives which
usually awakens in us specially pleasant memories.
The map, the blackboard, the desk, the piece of chalk, the globe,
the telephone, the Virgin, the backcloth, the Cross, the briefcase,
the book, the lesson…
This type of photographs seem to follow certain formal structural
patterns, both in the pose and in the decorated spaces and the objects
that can be seen, resulting in a stereotyped image which is common
to almost all family albums. The choice of these school images, made
between the 40s and the 60s, and gathered from family albums in Galiza
and in the rest of Spain, is meant to be a faithful representation
of the school panorama of a particular place and time.
Bearing in mind this relationship and the interest of this kind of
photographs, the appropriation, intervention and subsequent grouping
are the essence of this project, whose main attractive is the support
on which it has been made. The blackboards, the pieces of chalk and
the boards are used in accordance with the images represented on them,
in a sort of hybrid of photograph, painting and printing through which
the imperfections of those pictures are accentuated, robbing the appropriated
image of its originality. The different supports, together with the
printing techniques used, contribute to the reinterpretation of the
images, making them blurry, and taking us to a new space where all
the protagonists seem to belong to the same temporary, ephimeral world,
a world made up of memories.
Olalla García Sanleón
