Isidro Ramirez explores two different areas of learning (in a physical and literal sense), which could be viewed as being examples of both sites of 'training' and 'personal development'. Looking at the series of pictures, what is striking is how 'anonymous' these spaces are. They were all taken shortly after students had vacated the room. There are traces of human occupation in the way that a chair is placed, paper cup discarded or notes in brightly coloured marker pen are still attached to the board. Like all institutions, the spaces are 'muli-purpose'. They are inevitably 'anonymous': large amounts of people use them everyday. The flow of knowledge from tutor to student (and vice versa) is as ethereal as the process of people passing through here - people going on to 'bigger better' things. These are transitional spaces. They are places where some of the most profound evens in our lives occur: birth, death and learning.

The similarities between the two sites of learning which Ramirez examines are extended beyond their initial aesthetics. Are the model heads in the lecture theatre part of an anatomy lesson or a drawing lesson? Is the apparatus medical or technical? The room in the London Institute of Education could just as easily be part of a casualty ward with its screens and curtains (a physical examination room, rather than a mental examination room). The photographs reinforce the familiarity of these spaces - we have all been hare at one time or another in our lives.

But the photographs' perceptible neutrality belies their subject' purpose. In these brown walled, strip-lit rooms, a process takes place which is far from neutral, as Paulo Friere states'...there is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring conformity to it, or it becomes 'the practice of freedom', the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.'

What is interesting about these sites is not so much 'What has happened?' but 'What happens next?' There is an anticipation in these seemingly abandoned rooms where what has taken place seems to have finished. This sense of expectation and possibility are the very qualities that attract people to sit in these unappealing places in their spar time. Ramirez's impassive eye takes in the empty interiors but suggest human presence, turning his camera back in on the spaces in which small epiphanies take place every day.

©Text by Mellany Robinson for NextLevel Magazine,
Edition 2 Vol 1