The School album: images, insights and inequalities = L'àlbum de l'escola: imatges, introspecció i desigualtats Authors Ian Grosvenor Abstract Photographs, as Elizabeth Edwards noted in her essay on the photography of Susan Meiselas, are «cultural objects», made to «project certain meanings and elicit certain affects». Traditionally, historians, when they have worked with photographs, have been generally concerned with extracting evidence about the materiality of the past. This is done by looking at what is made present in an image. However, the meaning[s] we take from photographs are always framed by the context in which we come upon them and looking always has a subjective quality which shapes the ideas that are formed in dialogue with an image and the meanings that are then constructed. Using a 1920s school photographic album of Floodgate Street Infant School from 1920s Birmingham, England this small essay will explore the nature of images, their hidden meanings and the importance of contextualizing the visual. This exploration of the visual is grouped around four different categories of context the archive as a site of memory; the knowing gaze; the technology of display; and the singularity of the image. The essay also considers the idea of the «social biography» of an image and how digitization can transform original images and their meaning. Downloads Text complet (Català) PDF PDF (Español) Published 2010-07-05 Issue No. 15 (2010): gener-juny Section Photography and history of education License The intellectual property of articles belongs to the respective authors. On submitting articles for publication to the journal Educació i Història: Revista d'Història de l'Educació, authors accept the following terms:Authors assign to Society for the History of Education in Catalan-speaking countries (a subsidiary of Institut d’Estudis Catalans) the rights of reproduction, communication to the public and distribution of the articles submitted for publication to Educació i Història: Revista d'Història de l'Educació.Authors answer to Society for the History of Education in Catalan-speaking countries for the authorship and originality of submitted articles.Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for the reproduction of all graphic material included in articles.The Society for the History of Education in Catalan-speaking countries declines all liability for the possible infringement of intellectual property rights by authors.The contents published in the journal, unless otherwise stated in the text or in the graphic material, are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd) 3.0 Spain licence, the complete text of which may be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/deed.en. Consequently, the general public is authorised to reproduce, distribute and communicate the work, provided that its authorship and the body publishing it are acknowledged, and that no commercial use and no derivative works are made of it.The journal is not responsible for the ideas and opinions expressed by the authors of the published articles.