ABSTRACT

This article concentrates on visual sources relating to secondary

education, and asks how a collection of photographs can be

understood and interpreted as part of the institutional and collective

memory of one Finnish girls’ school. The photographs were published

in the anniversary books of the school. They construct an entirety,

where public memories are interwoven with individual and private

reminiscences. The article examines how the traditions of jubilee books

and the institutional setting of the school establish the boundaries

for the visual narratives of the collection and how the self-image

and identity of the school and its gendered nature are visualised in

the corpus. The long period (1882–2007) opens up possibilities for

studying how the changes in the Finnish education system and the

alteration of the girls’ school to a co-educational school are presented

in the photographs, and how these photographs create the imagery

of gender, class, equality and co-education.