Resumen de From elite traditions to middle-class cultures: images of secondary education in the anniversary books of a Finnish girls’ school, 1882–2007
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.
