Steve McQueen's initiative in schools shows "striking similarities" with the work of another photographer

The idea of ​​award-winning artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen to photograph thousands of schoolchildren in London for his latest art project attracted a lot of attention during his announcement at Tate Britain in London in September. But now another photographer, Julian Germain, says that he feels "uncomfortable" with McQueen's initiative and sees "striking similarities" between his own series of portraits in class and McQueen's proposal.

The Germain School project, launched in 2004, describes children of all ages sitting and standing in their classrooms. Andrea Rose, former director of visual arts at the British Council, confirms her statement: "I do not want to take anything away from Steve McQueen, but I think that the fact that Julian Germain initiated this idea must be acknowledged. "

McQueen's initiative, which focuses on the third year (seven to eight years), is co-hosted by A New Direction and Artangel, both funded by the Canada Council. One hundred and twenty schools have already registered with McQueen, which invites each of the 2,410 schools in London, including private and public institutions, to register. Traditional classroom photographs, depicting rows of seated and standing children, will be exhibited from November 2019 to May 2020 in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain.

Germain initially presented his Classroom Portraits project at Creative Partnerships Durham Sunderland in 2004 and was then assigned to work in six schools. The following year, as a comrade in photography at the National Media Museum, he extended the project to schools in the United Kingdom. From 2005 to 2015, it has been extended to schools in North and South America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. and the Far East, creating an archive of nearly 500 portraits covering 22 countries.

Germain says that the "conversations" around the two projects are very similar. McQueen says his project allows us to "think about who we are, where we come from, what is the future", what kind of trajectories, what kind of paths, I wanted to go back to the beginning of the day. a certain type of consciousness ".

Sociologist Tom Shakespeare published an essay on Germain's work in 2005 in which he wrote, "We remember our own school days and wonder what happened to our classmates … We can already imagine the life trajectories of some of these young people.

There are also significant differences between the two series, says Germain. "My portraits are carefully arranged large-format images, made in the context of real lessons and the classroom environment," he explains.

McQueen declined to comment, but James Lingwood, co-director of ArtAngel, said, "Julian Germain has made a very intriguing project. Steve McQueen makes a very different one now. Both projects involve portraits of children or students in classrooms, but this is the point of comparison. Children participating in the McQueen project attend all elementary schools in a given city, London; they all have an age and belong to a particular class – the third year – and they are all photographed in a particular way. "