Classroom Portraits

What happens when a stranger enters a classroom during a lesson and asks for the pupils' total concentration for fifteen minutes in order to make their portrait? He position everyone with great care (so that they can clearly be seen) and then demands that they are 'ready' and completely still for the long exposure. The results are both predictable and astonishing. This on-going series by Julian Germain started in northeast England. Since then Germain has visited schools throughout North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. His magnificent photographs are packed with detail - books open on graffittied desks, instructions on white and blackboards, artwork hanging on walls, notes scribbled on the backs of hands. And of course there are the faces of the children themselves; enrapt, bored, inquisitive, arrogant, shy, they incite endless curiosity about what these kids' lives are like and what their futures hold. Exquisitely reproduced in an oversized format, these portraits trigger memories of our own schooldays and bring into sharp focus the contemporary school experience throughout the world in all its diversity and universality.