Pull up the websites of any ten independent schools in the Boston area. Or ten in New York City. Or ten boarding schools in New England. You’ll see the same images: three students around a laptop, one laughing. A girl in safety goggles holding a beaker to the light. A teacher gesturing at a whiteboard. Fall foliage over a brick building. A soccer player mid-kick.

None of these are bad photographs. The problem is that they’re interchangeable, and the entire purpose of school marketing photography is to not be interchangeable.

How independent school photography ends up generic

Three causes, none of them the photographer’s fault alone.

The shot list is copied. School communications offices build shot lists by looking at other schools’ websites and Instagram feeds. So every independent school in Massachusetts and New York asks its photographer for the same things. The photographer delivers the list. The school looks like every other school. Next year, another school copies that website.

The images are staged. When a class is asked to “look like you’re working,” it produces the universal look of people pretending to work. Staged school photography removes the specific and replaces it with the generic, because the generic is what people perform when a camera is pointed at them.

The brief is “bright, warm, and diverse.” Fine goals, but they describe a mood, not a place. A campus photographer working to that brief can hit it anywhere. Nothing in it requires them to actually see your school.

What’s specific about a school

Every independent school has things that are only true of that school, and they’re rarely on the list. The gym that used to be a chapel. The seniors’ unofficial parking lot. The kindergarten teacher who’s been there thirty-one years and whose room looks like it. The ritual on the last day before winter break. The view from the third-floor science hallway at 3pm in October. In a New York City day school, it might be the rooftop play deck or the way the whole lower school moves through one stairwell at dismissal.

These aren’t decorative details. They’re what a family remembers after a tour and what an alum recognizes in a campaign mailing. They carry the culture of the place in a way “students collaborating” never will.

A good school photograph is one that couldn’t have been taken at any other school.

What admissions and communications offices can do

If you’re responsible for an independent school’s imagery, a few changes make an outsized difference.

Cut the shot list in half. Keep what you truly need for the website, social, and campaign layouts. Replace the rest with time. A campus photographer with unscheduled hours on your campus will find things you’d never think to ask for.

Stop staging. Tell teachers the photographer is coming and to run class as usual. Tell the photographer not to direct. Accept that some classes will be visually dull. The ones that aren’t will be worth more than anything you could have set up.

Write a brief about the place, not the mood. Instead of “warm and inclusive,” try “the lower school looks like a converted house because it is one” or “we’re the only school in Boston with a working farm.” Give the photographer something to find.

Compare two schools. When evaluating a school photographer, ask for galleries from two different independent schools. If you can’t tell which is which, they’ll do the same to you.

The tradeoff

Specific images are riskier. A photograph of your odd lunch tradition doesn’t say “academic excellence” the way a beaker does. Some trustees will ask why the science lab isn’t on the homepage. The answer is that every independent school in the Northeast has a science lab, and no family has ever chosen one because of it.

Evan Scales is a school and university photographer based in Boston, photographing independent schools in Massachusetts, New York City, Connecticut, and throughout New England for admissions, marketing, and advancement.