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ARTSDESK PLEASE! QUIET, Mandy O’Neill went back t
o school to document the lives of students. words Jack O’Higgins When we think about our school photos, we think of stiff smiles, rigid postures, a certain tension in the eyes that suggest someone’s holding us at gunpoint, just off-camera. These photos usually don’t have much use except to mark the passage of time, or to embarrass the subject whenever their friends or partners are visiting home. The portraits in Mandy O’Neill’s new photography exhibition, Quiet at the Back, could not be more different. Taken over an eight-year period in different schools in Dublin, O’Neill has captured stark images of children going to school in the midst of austerity measures. The children are at ease in the pictures, but there’s a defiance in their expressions that make the images deeply affecting. The work initially began back in 2004 as O’Neill’s final year project as a mature student in DIT. Reaching out to ten different schools from various demographics, she sent questionnaires out to the students asking them about their hopes and dreams, with the intent of combining them with portraits of the children. When O’Neill started taking pictures of the students in their uniforms, she realised she’d hit a rich vein. “It made me think about my relationship to school and my own educational background,” O’Neill says. “When I left school in the 80s, I didn’t go to college, it just wasn’t an option. I didn’t understand the value of education until I did my BA in photography. “When I got the responses back from the questionnaires, I was shocked by the difference between, say, a school in south county Dublin and the school I went to in terms of the expectations and aspirations of the children. It was really stark and it just got me thinking again 70