Steve McQueen aims to photograph every year 3 pupil in London
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Loading... - SABINA DANIELS
- 18 Sep 2021
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Thousands of class photographs of primary school pupils are to be gathered by the Oscar-winning film-maker and artist Steve McQueen for a project described by its backers as one of the world’s most ambitious art projects.
All 2,410 primary schools in London will be invited to take part, agreeing to allow class photographs of their year 3 seven- and eight-year-olds that would then be exhibited at Tate Britain and across the city.
McQueen said it was a project that allowed us to “reflect on who we are, where we come from, what is the future. We live in London and we all think we know London, but we don’t and to have a reflection of our immediate future is I think quite urgent.”
This month, 115,000 seven-year-olds are starting classes in London primary schools and in theory could all be part of the project.
The idea of creating such a potentially vast portrait has been in McQueen’s head for about five years. “At some point in one’s life you tend to look backwards and you ask ‘where is so and so?’ and ‘what’s happened to them?’… I just wanted to reflect on how I got to where I got to.
“People have passed and died, people are doing well, not doing well. Those kind of trajectories, those kind of paths, I wanted to go back to the beginning of a certain kind of consciousness.”
He has fond memories of attending school in Ealing aged seven. “It was exciting. I couldn’t wait to go to school every morning. I loved art, I loved being with my friends, I loved experimenting and drawing. It was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful time.”
He said there were no concepts of gender or race. “I had no idea who was who or what was what, it was just fun.”
The project, backed by Tate Britain, the arts commissioning organisation Artangel and the creative learning specialists A New Direction, will involve a team of about 30 McQueen-briefed photographers visiting the schools and capturing the standard class photo images.
With strict laws around data protection and child safeguarding it has been a far more complicated project to organise than it might have been 10 years ago. It has also been planned under considerable secrecy.
James Lingwood, the co-director of Artangel, said even using a 1976 photo of McQueen’s class, retrieved from the loft by his mum, for the project’s launch had been a challenge as efforts had to be made to get permission from everyone in it.
“There has been a crack team of researchers reporting to Tate trying to track down these individuals without actually sharing with them what the project was about. I’m pleased to say we got two-thirds of them and they have consented to this year 3 photograph being shown to the world today.”
The work is without commentary, said the Tate Britain director, Alex Farquharson, “yet hugely politically resonant, that’s the beauty of the work”.
Visitors might reflect on the diversity of London in a post-Brexit world or, said the Tate director, Maria Balshaw, think “about the place of creativity in our wider education system”.
Every primary school in London has been invited to register at Tateyear3project.org.uk. They can then choose a date for a photographer to visit.
The photographs will go on display in Tate Britain’s enormous Duveen galleries between November 2019 and May 2020. There will also be an outdoor exhibition in each of London’s 33 boroughs.
To coincide with the project, a survey of McQueen’s work will be at Tate Modern from February until May 2020.
Given many parents and grandparents of a year 3 London child would be likely to visit the Tate Britain show it will unquestionably boost gallery visitor numbers. “A happy outcome,” said Farquharson.
