In Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, covering every inch of the soaring walls like so many mosaic tiles, classrooms cast in blues and burgundies tesselate.
Steve McQueen’s Year 3 class at Little Ealing Primary School, 1977
Looking at any crowd from a distance, you notice the shape of the group organism before the individuals which make it up. Zoom in on one wall, and its snapshots come into focus. You remember this.
Steve McQueen’s Year Three is the result of the artist’s approaching every primary school in London. Two thirds took part, adding their water-drop classes to the capital’s ocean; in total, we’re looking at three thousand group pictures and more than 76,000 children. The same uniform repeats in half-columns – coherent units, emerging from an unreadable sea. Zoom in again – who’s that, second row deep? And what kind of home did she step out of this morning?
Set up en masse and then at enormous scale on billboards around the city, the effect is one of simultaneous overwhelm and monotonous uniformity. But, as eyes adjust to children, like they adjust to changing light levels, inflections of individuality start to emerge. That kid at the front — glowing with pride and snapped mid-shuffle. The girl near the back, hiding behind her friend and looking at the floor.
McQueen’s is a project whose impact works on two planes: macro, and micro. London is made of people, and its schools of children. Poor kids, rich kids. Black kids, white kids. Shiny shoes and skewiff collars, teachers’ pets and class clowns. Hindu kids and Christian kids, bright, struggling, naughty kids, happy and sad and straining. Everybody line up quietly, now. And —smile!
Croydon, St Cyprian’s Greek Orthodox Primary Academy
Ealing, Clifton Primary School
Alpha Preparatory School
Tower Hamlets, Columbia School
Year 3 Photoshoot at Tyssen Community Primary School (11) © Tate
Look at them, look at you. In these beaming, bolshie faces, everyone you’ve ever met or will meet. From faith schools to comprehensives, private academies to home schools, McQueen’s project flattens the future into something we can see. Everyone was 8, once — not only world leaders and history’s villains, but the people hurtling past you on the street or biffing you on the tube. That ex you hate, and your boss too. Were they always so full of sharp edges, or were they softer? What were you like, then?Â
I, for one, can almost smell the gym lino and feel Harriet Cody sitting on my skirt. School photos hold a weird power over us all, and his unite the children pictured in them as much as the audiences swelling through Tate’s halls. With few exceptions, McQueen’s medium is universal: faced with the installation’s sum and its parts, wildly specific memories of that shared experience are conjured in every visitor. Suddenly seven. Pig tails, or plaits? Sitting next to Patience, or Ryan?
It’s in this rubber-band collapse from long-view to microscope that McQueen’s Year Three trills its clearest notes. The specificity – millions of little decisions and agonies, class politics and class politics, Patience or Ryan, red or blue uniforms – is what make the school photos so appealing.
It’s a naïve impulse in middle-class gallery goers to push their cosy childhoods onto Year Three’s faces, but part of its heartbreak is in the knowledge that not every smile is a genuine or frequent one. For some children, school will mean safety; for others, structure; others still, torture. The best of days, the worst of days – and those days chosen, arbitrary, to sum up the whole in a shiny snapshot.
For these children, and however they feel about school, the yearly ritual remains their first taste of belonging to something beyond immediate family: seeing themselves, literally, in a societal context. I go to BLANK school. I am in class BLANK. What they cannot grasp, yet – these hopeful and sulky and funny and peculiar proto-people, who stream in on school visits to see themselves in high-definition – is what comes next.
The world beyond the school gates – full of freedom on the one hand, and uncertainty on the other. Whether adults looking on, accompanying parents and teachers, remember it fondly or with spitting fury, they know it very well indeed: after all, they once sat in neat rows and uniforms themselves. What will this generation find, on the other side? Far fewer calls for ‘sitting nicely, please’ – and whether that’s a relief or a shock depends on them.
