’80s Student Life of a Massachusetts High School Through Amazing Black and White Photos

   

Olive Pierce (1925-2016) was a documentary photographer based in Massachusetts and Maine. The collection comprises several hundred black-and-white photographic prints taken by Pierce over her long career. The earliest images (1960s) feature landscapes and individuals in Maine, a subject Pierce returned to throughout her life. Other subjects include: political protests in Cambridge, Massachusetts and life in the Jefferson Park neighborhood in Cambridge during the 1970s; high school students in Cambridge (1980s); the lives of Iraqi children in war zones in 1999 and 2003, and protests in the U.S. against that war.

 
 
Student life in the 1980s taken by Olive Pierce
 
Also included are print publications featuring Pierce's photographs; publicity for exhibits and lectures; Pierce’s 1987 guide to teaching photography; a video on DVD and audio lecture about her work; some correspondence; unpublished book mock-ups and a memoir/diary; a self-published illustrated partial memoir (2014); approximately 2557 film negatives; and about 40 slides featuring images of her early life and family. Acquired by the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.
 
This series from Cambridge Room at the Cambridge Public Library contains photographs that Olive Pierce took during her tenure as the photography teacher at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. For three years, she photographed students and the resulting work was published in No Easy Roses: A Look at the Lives of City Teenagers (1986).
 
Women in bathing suits wait outside a locker room

 

Two teenagers smoking against wall

 

Basketball game

 

Basketball game

 

Boy holding a small wooden construction above his head

 

Boy in Queen t-shirt in classroom

 

Boy painting a window frame

 

Candid view of two teenagers in a high school room with tables and chairs

 

Carpenter class

 

Classroom scene

 

Classroom scene

 

Classroom scene

 

Classroom scene

 

Classroom scene

 

Coaching addressing basketball team

 

Drum major

 

Group clowning for the camera

 

High school biology class

 

High school class

 

High school computer class

 

High school drafting class

 

High school girls' room

 

High school girls' softball

 

High school hallway

 

High school, first day, freshman year

 

Large group of students laughing

 

Man leaning on a boxing heavy bag

 

Portrait of Ho Bachtran

 

Portrait of teenage girl

 

Portrait of three students

 

Portrait of three teenagers

 

Portrait of three teenagers

 

School nurse examining a student

 

Six teenagers in a classroom

 

Student applying makeup in mirror

 

Student in boxing gloves

 

Student in the gym

 

Student mopping cafeteria kitchen

 

Student on field

 

Student with shop machine

 

Student working as food server

 

Students and teacher posing in mechanical room

 

Students at funeral

 

Students cheering in school gym

 

Students cheering

 

Students clowning in a school hallway

 

Students hanging out outside school

 

Students in school hallway

 

Students in school hallway

 

 
Students socializing in a bathroom

 

Students working in photo lab

 

Teacher addressing a student in a hallway

 

Teacher and student in classroom

 

Teacher and student in classroom

 

Teacher scolding a student in carpenter class

 

Teenage boy posing in front of ornate door

 

Three students in theater costumes

 

Three students standing outside photography room

 

Two basketball players in the locker room

 

Two drummers

 

Two students clowning by the hall lockers

 

Two students dissecting a frog

 

Two students in a stairwell

 

Two students laughing

 

Two students posing in school hallway

 

Two students sitting in a school office

 

Two students smiling

 

Two teenage girls hold up a third cheering teenage girl

 

Two teenagers in a makeshift gym

 

 
View into courtyard from above

 

(Photo © Olive Pierce)