The Window at the School
On portraits, time, and standing by the same window years later
I go to the school to photograph teachers. I spend the entire day there, arriving in the morning and leaving when the light begins to fade. It is a public school in Jersey City, a building that has learned how to contain many lives at once, and to remain quiet about all of them.
I meet the teachers during their preparation periods, in the brief intervals when the classrooms no longer belong to children. These rooms change when they are empty. The desks wait. The chairs turn inward. The walls, covered with lessons and diagrams, seem to listen to themselves.
I come as an artist, not as part of the school’s daily machinery. This distinction is felt immediately. We speak as adults who have stepped aside from the noise of the day. In these moments, the school becomes something closer to a shared interior, a place where time slows and allows conversation.
I cannot show the portraits here. This absence does not trouble me. Every place demands its own form of respect. Instead, I photograph what remains when the people withdraw: windows, corridors, reflections, the pale light that drifts across a table and settles there, as if waiting.
At 9:30 in the morning, standing beside a window, a school psychologist tells me about a day in 2001. He was here then — in this building, by this same glass — when the city changed its rhythm. He was born and raised in New York. He speaks without urgency, without the need to persuade me of the story’s weight. The window has already understood.
Now it is 2026. We are standing together, separated by years that the glass does not acknowledge. Outside, the world continues its ordinary movement. Inside, the school holds these layered moments quietly, without ceremony.
I photograph the window again. No faces appear. Only light, faint reflections, and the feeling that others have stood here before us, thinking their own unspoken thoughts.
When I leave in the afternoon, the building returns to its rhythm. The portraits remain with the teachers who allowed me into their quiet hours.
What stays with me is the sensation of having passed through a place that remembers more than it reveals — and the window, letting the day go by.
