'Back to School' shows human faces behind school closures

Four Philadelphia photographers are going back to school.

But the schools they are visiting shut their doors two years ago and won't be opening this fall.

"Back to School," a documentary photography exhibition that runs through Sept. 27 at the Gravy Studio & Gallery, will bring students, teachers, and community members back to six of the 24 public schools that closed in 2013.

The show, a culmination of work by Lendl Tellington, Sarah Milinski, Sahar Coston-Hardy, and Marco Hill, attempts to document the tumultuous aftermath of school closures and the effects of a severely underfunded school system.

The exhibit pairs Tellington and Milinski's dramatic portraits of students, teachers, alumni, and parents with Coston-Hardy's and Hill's photographs of the hollow buildings.

"Everybody has stories about the schools," Hill said. "And so for that place to no longer be in use, for me, it seems like if you grew up in a house and a house burned down. You can talk about it, but it's not a tangible thing you can access. You can't talk to somebody else who lives there anymore, because nobody lives there anymore."

Guests are encouraged to bring headphones to listen to the stories of the photographed. Tellington said he hopes their stories will bring people "one step closer to the memories and the firsthand experience of what closing a school does to someone."

One story is that of Ismael Jimenez, who lost his teaching job at Germantown High School when the school closed its doors in June 2013.

"I feel like Germantown High School was definitely turning the corner at that point," Jimenez says in an audio clip. "Progress was being made with student academics and also behavior - everything across the board. And we just started to get a sense of, you know, a community. But then the school got closed down."

Hill said he was inspired to document the changes by people like Octavios Mitchell, a South Philadelphia resident who attended Edward W. Bok Technical High School in the 1990s, and whose son was a student there when the school shut down in 2013. The building is now home to Le Bok Fin, a temporary rooftop restaurant.

"To close a school and then a couple years later turn it into a bar, it's a total slap in the face," Mitchell said. "Not only to the students, but to the community."

Mitchell said such exhibitions as "Back to School" are necessary because they create awareness of the chaos and grief that follow school closings. The exhibit arrives at the same time as "reForm," an art installation in Temple University's Tyler School of Art that chronicles the end of Fairhill School, which closed in 2013.

"The schools that close, they're just relics that sit there, and they're buildings, and a lot of them are very ornately beautiful in a lot of ways," Tellington said. "But on the same note, just the neglect of leaving a building behind also symbolizes some of the neglect that takes place with human life in the Philadelphia school system."