Home From School
a-birdie
Angels amongst the architecture, here is a quintessential image of feminine youth. They are school girls and like any other three gathered in any other place in the world, they’re immersed in themselves. A tiny society resides in their formation; they have rituals and ceremonies, hierarchies and protocols. They have primal methods of making law and imposing order. They may break apart and reform, find new dimensions and echo ancient tribal behaviors; ever changing, ever remaining the same.
The perfect framing of this photo makes it easy to invent your own story, to imagine the intricacies of their relationship in your own personal context. I cannot know, it is the particular genius of this photograph to be deliberately iconic, but it reminded me of the poem Three Girls by Hazel Hall.
By telling us so little, it teaches us a lot.
THREE school-girls pass this way each day:
Two of them go in the fluttery way
Of girls, with all that girlhood buys;
But one goes with a dream in her eyes,
Two of them have the eyes of girls
Whose hair is learning scorn of curls,
But the eyes of one are like wide doors
Opening out on misted shores.
And they will go as they go to-day
On to the end of life’s short way;
Two will have what living buys,
And one will have the dream in her eyes.
Two will die as many must,
And fitly dust will welcome dust;
But dust has nothing to do with one—
She dies as soon as her dream is done.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, catherinejamieson and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
