Teachers acting as photographers: The progressive image of the Cervantes school in Madrid (1918-1936)

In the 21 st century, historians, in general, and historians of education, in particular, have been under the spell of the visual turn. Images are no longer illustrations to brighten up texts, but rather they have become objects of in-depth social semiotic analysis. The seeds for the use of images in historical research, however, were already planted at the beginning of the 20 th century. In this article, we go back to the roots of the attraction for images felt by historians. Furthermore, we will link this academic interest with the fascination of amateur photographers for creating new ways of giving visibility to their world and their daily activities. But what happens if these amateur photographers are professional teachers? In order to answer this question, we will specifically focus on the photographs taken by the headmaster and teachers of an experimental public school in Madrid, the Cervantes School, in the 1920s and 1930s. For this purpose we have built a photographic archive of all the existing pictures (N=431) that were taken in this “new school” where, contrary to other internationally well-
known institutions that were inspired by the New Education movement, children from lower income families were educated. We then raise the question as to what sort of image of this anonymous school in Madrid is conveyed via this photographic archive, and more specifically, what differences we can find between the image of this unknown public school and the so-called “progressive image” of education that was exhibited through the official channel of the New Education movement, the British journal The New Era? We conclude with some remarks about the usefulness of our pictorial archive for drawing conclusions about the Cervantes School that could not have been reached if we were solely to rely on the textual material that was previously collected by one of the authors of this article.