The photographs are mostly black-and-white, curling, crinkled and yellowing with age, a series of freeze-frame memories from a school that no longer exists.
Most of the pictures have no names attached, most are undated. The only way to fix them in time is through the hairstyles - the Farrah Fawcett layers on the white girls, the 'fros on the black kids, or, later, the Jheri curls. Sometimes, the clothes offer hints - the short-shorts the basketball players wore in a distant, pre-baggy era, or the go-go boots on one woman during what looks like a faculty sing-along around a piano, the bell-bottoms on who surely was the "cool" teacher.
This is what remains of Baltimore's Southwestern High, the late and not-so-lamented school that closed last year. It was one of those persistently failing schools that the state tried to take over in 2006, and no stranger to police calls. Plus, its massive, fortress-like campus - originally built to accommodate more than 2,000 students - had become outdated during a time of declining enrollments and a shifting philosophy toward smaller learning environments.
But that is not the story told through the pictures, stacks of which were left behind in the school, which has been taken over by the nonprofit SEED Foundation. SEED will open a public boarding school on the site this fall, similar to one it already runs in Washington.
It was SEED's director of new school development in Maryland, Carol Beck, who discovered the abandoned photographs as she went through the 350,000-square-foot building to ready it for renovations.
"It's like moving out of a house," Beck said. "You're supposed to be moving furniture, but instead, you're going, `Oh look at this.'"
They're nothing special, really, except that's what makes them so compelling, so universal. Change a few externals, and they're your high school photographs. There are the team pictures - capturing smiling faces, scowling ones and that inevitable awkward moment when the photographer clicks just as you were getting one last scratch on a suddenly itchy cheek. Year to year, you see who remained on the team, who dropped or graduated out.
Anyone remember Mrs. Scott? She appears in one tennis team picture that has the names written on the back - no first name for her, of course, unless you count "Mrs." - and she appears in others, bespectacled, always smiling, in an array of T-shirts or track suits. There's a formal photograph of young man in an ROTC uniform, next to an American flag, and inscribed on the back, "For Ms. Scott from Maurice." (There's a last name, but I can't make it out.)
