One of the most commonly preserved type of photographs to be found within family albums archive is the school photograph. Prior to World War II, most school photographs are group photographs showing the whole class. For the commercial photographers who took these pictures, this meant the possible sale of 30-40 prints from one negative. It also meant that the costs to the customer could be kept low, thus bringing the photographs within the means of the poorer families who could not afford individual portraits of their children.
The standard pose is of the group in the school yard, often flanked by the teacher, with a slate identifying the class and the year. The other common pose is in the classroom, with learning accessories conspicuously in evidence. In virtually all photographs, the children are seen looking directly at the camera, for a very simple reason. If the photographer wished to sell his pictures, the faces of all the children had to be clearly visible.
The photographs tell us more about the role and objectives of the school than they do about the children themselves. Schools used photographs as a means of promoting the values they wished to promote, such as good attendance, success in competitions, and achievement on the sports field. They also commemorated special events such as Empire Day and May Day by commissioning photographs.
These photographs, therefore, were not intended to serve as a documentary record of school life. Whole areas of school activity go totally unrecorded, unposed or informal images are rare, and the daily routines of school life were rarely photographed. Nevertheless, the archive
