The big picture: Hicham Benohoud frames the classroom as theatre

The Guardian

23-03-2025

No doubt you can sympathise with at least one of the pupils in the image. She has her head down, working hard, so bowed in thought her face is almost pressed right against her paper. A few seats down, a boy adopts a similar pose. One girl has her ankles crossed, while another has hers splayed. Across the room, one girl's shoes are practical, while another's are oddly adult, sandals with heels, hand-me-downs, maybe. You remember how imagination allowed you to disappear, to escape, to take leave of the four walls of the classroom, of the uncomfortable wooden chair and desk at which you tried not to fidget.
Or were you the boy breaking the peace, wild and unruly, hanging over a table while lying flat on your stomach, legs dangling, fixing us with your cheeky gaze, as in this image from the Moroccan photographer Hicham Benohoud's book The Classroom? The images were taken between 1994 and 2000 while Benohoud worked as an art teacher and found himself, like the students, stifled by the educational system. The teacher who inspires by introducing simple freedoms into a rigid educational setting is a familiar cinematic trope (To Sir, With Love, Dangerous Minds, Entre les Murs, AKA The Class). Benohoud makes it his own in quiet black-and-white photographs that show how students, when given the opportunity to play and experiment, can redefine their surroundings with the leanest of creative means. Chairs and tables become frames within frames, reveal and conceal faces, as do paper cutouts held up playfully. Strings and tape, cardboard and fabric become interventions in space or extensions of the body, curtains and shrouds, places to hide, to refuse to be seen.
Benohoud's project and its emphasis on youthful self-authorship is as much about the present as the past, with how traditional curriculum meets ever-evolving post-colonial identity. 'As soon as I took my camera out, their faces would light up. 'What's he going to get us to do now?' I could feel their gaze on me: we had a real understanding,' the photographer has said of the new energy in the room. These images are portraiture as pedagogy, a reminder that how we see ourselves and others, see and are seen, frame and are framed, makes the world around us visible in myriad shapes and forms – like all the best educations should.
The Classroom is published by Loose Joints (£42)