New School Openings - They Only Happen Once

In 2015 I got a call from a marketing manager at an international school in Singapore. The school had opened its senior campus that year, adding to an existing campus that had been running since 2014. They had ceremony photos from the original opening. Speeches, ribbon cutting, that kind of thing. What they didn't have was anything usable from that first year of actual school life. No classrooms in use, no students in the corridors, nothing that told the story of the school or its students and staff in that first year. So that was the phone call. Come in and build the photo library.

It’s stayed with me, because I see this happen quite lot. The first year is already gone. You can't go back and photograph what September felt like, or what the school looked like before anyone had really settled in. You can only move forward and start from where you are.

It’s come back to me, now in particular, as the UAE is in the middle of a massive school opening boom. New campuses, new communities and new brands being built from scratch. It's an exciting moment to be working in this sector, and it's also a point where the photography decisions made in this one year tend to matter more than people realise and then echo down the years - one way or another.

Two different kinds of imagery, two different timelines

I tend to think about a new school's photography in two phases.

The first is the building itself. A brand new school has a particular quality in those early weeks that it will never have again. Everything is clean, the signage is fresh, the facilities are exactly as the architects intended. That's worth capturing, and capturing properly, while it lasts. It's the kind of imagery that works well for initial marketing materials, the website, early social content.

The second phase is harder to rush. Schools get their character from the people in them, and that takes time. A classroom looks like a classroom until student work goes on the walls, displays start to fill the corridors, and the building starts to feel inhabited rather than just occupied. That environmental warmth, the sense that real learning is happening here, tends to come a term or two in rather than on day one. Trying to force it too early usually shows.

Students themselves are a different matter. Children look like children wherever you put them, and genuine moments of learning, friendship, and activity are available from day one if you know where to look. So the people photography can start early. It's the spaces that need a bit of time.

Not every new school is a blank canvas

It's worth saying that not every new opening is a ground-up build. Some schools open in premises with an existing history, or take on a campus that's changing hands and identity. In those cases there's already some environmental character present, although the branding work is often still being established. That changes the photography approach somewhat. The visual language of the new identity needs time to bed in before it reads clearly in images, but the building itself might have warmth from day one.

First impressions last

Whatever the school, whatever the timeline, the first year is the first year. The moments within it don't happen on repeat. A marketing manager who's just joined a new school has an enormous amount on their plate, and photography is often somewhere lower down the list than it probably should be. I understand that. But, the schools I've worked with that got it right were the ones that treated the visual record as something worth building from the very beginning, not something to catch up on later.

You can always commission more photography next year. But, you can never go back and shoot this year again.