Oscar-winner Mcqueen wants to take photo of every 7-year-old in London for the Tate

Award-winning artist and director aims to put on display 115,000 portraits taken in capital’s schools

WHEN Steve Mcqueen, the Oscar and Turner Prize-winning artist, conceived of a landmark project to photograph every seven-year-old in London for a Tate Britain installation, the gallery hoped it would help introduce the art world to a new generation.

But arranging it has not been simple. The project, involving 115,000 children in 2,410 primary schools across the capital, has seen gallery staff go to extraordinary lengths to make sure children will eventually be able to search for their own faces in the Duveen Galleries. Already two

years in the planning, curators have been navigating the complexities of data protection and parental permission. The pupils’ names will not be recorded after it was thought, said Mcqueen, “not really appropriate”.

Every parent will have to give written approval for their child to take part, before one of six specially trained photographers, most of whom have previously worked as professionals in schools, visit.

The finished pictures, styled as classic classroom photographs, will be installed at Tate Britain from November 2019 to May 2020, and will be free to visit.

The photograph that inspired the project, of Mcqueen’s own Year 3 class at Little Ealing Primary School in 1976, has been published ahead of the show, after researchers tracked down each classmate to ask their permission.

Mcqueen said: “There have been a lot of legal hurdles we had to clear.”

Maria Balshaw, the Tate director, said it “may well be the most ambitious art work we have ever shown at Tate Britain”, calling it a “collective portrait of London’s future”.

Year 3, which children start at the age of seven, was chosen as a “milestone year in a child’s development and sense of identity, when they become more conscious of the world beyond their immediate family”.

It is intended to capture the “moment of excitement, anxiety and hope” in the children, as well as showcasing the diversity of a new London generation. Unveiling the project at Tate Britain, Mcqueen said:

“I think that often people think they are insignificant [but] you’re important and I want to take a photograph of you. It’s important and interesting and you’re interesting, it’s

putting them in the context of the world.” He added: “The idea of having a photograph exhibited here, for a child, it will be amazing.

“I remember when I was five years old and I had a painting of mine exhibited in my local library and the fact that other people see what you do makes an amazing impression.” Every London primary school is invited to register and choose a date and time for a Tate photographer, briefed by Mcqueen, to visit their school and take the class photo.

Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, said: “We’ve come up with the infrastructure and plan to make this happen.” Mcqueen won the Turner Prize in 1999 for a video based on Buster Keaton’s collapsing house stunt and in 2014 the best picture Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, which he directed and produced.

Steve Mcqueen, middle row, fifth from left, at Little Ealing Primary School, and right, yesterday at Tate Britain ‘It is intended to capture the moment of excitement anxiety and hope, and showcase the diversity of a new London generation’