After posting my previous blog entry about a moment in time that I will probably never forget I was reminded of quite a few more that I still have clear recollections of and it surprised me just how many of them were taken in schools.

When I left the Times Educational Supplement in 2008 after fourteen years as a staff photographer there and another seven years prior to that freelancing for them I had a month of ‘gardening leave’ before I could resume my freelance career. One of the things that I did during that time was to radically re-write my CV and that included trying to calculate just how many educational establishments I had shot photographs in up to that point. By going back through diaries and counting them up the figure that I came to was 4,334. That’s pre-schools, primary schools, secondary schools, colleges and universities all lumped in together. Stripping colleges and universities out of that figure I calculate that I am getting close to having made 4,000 visits to schools and that is stretched across 32 different countries.

Since going freelance in 2008 I have shot a lot of school prospectuses, done quite a few editorial commissions in schools and visited many more as part of my corporate work. Schools are such a rewarding place to be a photographer because there are so many engaging pictures to be had.

It was almost 38 years ago that I shot my first commission in a school and it was 44 years ago that I first brought a camera into my own secondary school. I still love visiting schools and it is slightly ironic that one of my most recent working visits to a school was that very same secondary school where I had been a pupil. I have a gallery devoted to education images on my portfolio website so if you’d like to see more, please pop over there and have a look.

So let’s go back to those pictures that I’ll never forget for a moment. It’s almost impossible to choose one but I’m going to have a go. The picture below was taken almost exactly twenty years ago during one of my favourite overseas assignments for the TES. The trip to Rajasthan in India was to report on a project run by the UK based charity Save The Children who were funding a scheme in the Nokha area to allow girls between 12 and 15 years old who do not get access to education to go to a boarding centre for a few months in which time they cover the syllabus normally expected to take five years. The scheme was being visited by eight girls from Stroud High School in Gloucestershire who had won a competition run by G Nation (short for giving nation) another charity aimed at raising the awareness of young people towards the concept of charitable giving.

This particular frame was taken really early in the morning and shows two of the Indian students going to collect firewood outside the gates of the former monastery where they were living and studying. They were so dedicated to their studies that they took books with them as they went about their chores to keep up with their peers. Whenever I hear a young person complaining about having to do their homework I think of this moment and of that trip. It also makes me feel a little embarrassed about my own aversion to studying when I was young.

Techie Stuff: Photograph shot on a Canon EOS1D MkII and a Canon EF 16-35 f2.8L lens. 800 ISO 1/125th of a second f5.6