Imatges fotogràfiques i cultura escolar en el franquisme: una exploració de l'arxiu etnogràfic = Photographs and school culture in francoism: an exploration of the ethnographical archive

In this article we explore the possibilities of photographs as a source for studying
the history of school culture. In the first part we describe the state of art of the historical
research in educational iconography, especially the recent trends and discussions within
the scientific community of historians of education. Concepts like «school culture»,
«symbols», «myths», «rituals», «visuality» and «visibility» are presented and defined
as a previous discourse convention for understanding the language of images. The
analysis of sources kept in the so called «visual archives» and some other theoretical and
methodological issues are summarized in the next pages. In the second part we study
a «visual archive» of an ethnographical nature, the Anselmo Romero Marín historical
collection that is placed in the «Manuel Bartolomé Cossío» Museum of History of
Education, Complutense University (Madrid). It gathers 891 monographs that were
written between 1950 and 1968 by the university students of Educational Sciences.
These works that can be considered as pioneer experiences of the ethnographical research in Spain that recorded and critically analysed an educational reality, i.e. a
specific school or all the educational institutions in a village or in the neighbourhood of
a city. Many of these monographs included photographs made by its authors or other
schoolteachers that performed as amateur photographers, trying to capture as much
information as possible from the educational reality. In the third part we interpret the
evidence gathered from a sample of 138 «class photographs» that were included in these
records. For studying the school culture in the Francoist period both a «narrative» and a
«communicative» approach are tried, also the concepts of «visualization» and «visibility»
were considered as categories for analysing the «visual archive». Our hypothesis is that
the students of Educational Sciences attempted to give visibility to the «black box» of
schooling by visualizing some school practices. Performances and rituals around the
lesson were represented in the photographs, maybe because that was considered the
heart of the teaching-learning process. The blackboard became from this perspective, a
symbolic object, the site of production of school knowledge. The position of the teacher
in the photographs tells us about the existence of a «photographical awareness» that
resolved into a predominant teacher-centred composition. The role of the images in
the study of the continuities and discontinuities of the school culture and of its icons of
tradition and innovation is the topic of the last paragraph of this article.