In the class photos that line the cafeteria walls at the Upper Campus, the faces seem familiar even though they span decades.
Students and faculty are noticeably formal in the earliest images, their eyes hollow and even sad as they stare back, hands crisply folded, into the camera. The expressions soften as the photos evolve into the 1970s and 80s – student smiles are wide and beaming, their poses friendly and more relaxed.
There are 30 class photos in all in the cafeteria, a generous sampling of those who have lived, learned and played at the Upper Campus of Ojai Valley School since it graduated its first class some 60 years ago.
But until the start of this school year, all of that history lay broken and out of sight in an Upper Campus storage closet. That’s when art teacher Chia Hersk rose to the rescue.
Unwilling to allow the images to remain in the dark, Ms. Hersk spent months on a project to inject new life into the old photos. She salvaged and reframed all the images she could and then set out to hang the class photos – in order of graduation year – in the cafeteria for all to see.
“They were all just sitting in storage, and I just thought it was a shame,” Ms. Hersk said. “We had those up in the old cafeteria for years and everyone loved looking at them. I just wanted to bring that back.”
In a time of short-lived social media posts and instant-but-quickly-forgotten iPhone images, the high school class photo remains a powerful time capsule. The portraits connect classmates across generations and geography, providing a snapshot in time of lives once lived together.
At OVS, the tradition goes back nearly a century, with the earliest class photo shot at the Lower Campus in 1930. It now resides in the Alumni and Development Office, while others have found space in other Frost Hall offices and in the Greenberg Activity Center, which proudly lays claim to the school’s largest class photo collection.
At the high school, the earliest class photo was snapped in 1965, a portrait of the first class to graduate from the Upper Campus. That class photo hangs with two others on a wall in the high school’s front office.
Many more class photos have been taken since, including in every one of the four years that Interim Head of School Craig Floyd attended the Upper Campus.
“It’s a snapshot of who we were at any given moment in time,” said Mr. Floyd, whose class photos are among those that now hang in the school cafeteria. “It’s just another piece of nostalgia so that when students come back they can see who they went to school with and relive their memories.”
That’s what Ms. Hersk had in mind when she set out to rehabilitate the old photos.
The images used to hang in the old cafeteria, which is where the boys lounge is today. When the new cafeteria was built and the old space was taken over for various uses, the class photos were relocated and ultimately found their way to a storage room. Somewhere along the way, many were badly banged up.
Ms. Hersk took it upon herself to reframe all those that could be salvaged. And today, 30 of those – starting with the Class of 1966 and ending with the Class of 2000 – now grace the cafeteria walls.
Many years of class photos are still missing and Ms.Hersk said she has asked the Alumni Office about tracking down the rest so that those could be put up as well. But until then, she said she is happy with the progress she has been able to make.
“I think it’s fun,” she said of the photo project. “But it’s also to see your history, the other students that went here, and just how different it was back then.”
