Between 1994 and 2002, Hicham Benohoud was an art teacher in a Moroccan secondary school. Frustrated by the rigidity of the system around him, he turned his own classroom into a working studio and a makeshift darkroom, and handed his students both the camera and a degree of authorship. *The Classroom*, published by Loose Joints and edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon, gathers the photographs that came out of those years. The images are staged and deliberately strange: props improvised from classroom furniture, bodies arranged into poses that resist easy reading, a persistent tension between the institutional room and the liberties taken inside it. Absurdity, humour and unease sit close together, framed with precision and tilted just far enough to unsettle.
The photographs work on two registers at once. On one level they document a pedagogical experiment, carried out quietly and collaboratively, in which photography became a way of teaching creative agency rather than obedience. On another, they form a sustained critique of authority as it operates under a postcolonial state: the classroom as a site where discipline is rehearsed and where a child’s imaginative gesture can briefly exceed it. Benohoud’s interest in performance, the body and power relations, familiar from his wider practice, is visible here in its earliest and most direct form.
Drawing on the artist’s original negatives, this book is the most comprehensive account of the series to date. The 144-page section-sewn quarterbound hardcover, with a buckram debossed spine and trimmed edges, includes 76 monotone plates and an excerpt from Michel Foucault’s *Discipline and Punish*. The design, by Loose Joints Studio, treats the sequence as an argument rather than a survey, allowing the repetitions and small deviations of the classroom setting to accumulate.
For collectors, the case for the book rests on the work itself: a foundational series, made decades before its concerns with pedagogy, performance and colonial aftermath became common currency in photographic practice. That the material has been assembled and sequenced with this much care gives the series the coherent presentation it has long warranted.
