Contemporary Art
Schwartz Art Collection
Schwartz Art Collection
Orit Raff
(Israeli, born 1970)
Desk #7, 1999
Orit Raff, Desk #7, 1999, chromogenic print. 30 1/2 x 35 1/4 in., Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School
In photographs culled from a number of schools in New York, Raff presents evidence of a key moment in the shaping of memory: when the child leaves home, abandoning the domestic realm for the social sphere of school. Here, memory is composed out of an accretion of marks, the etched traces of inhabitation that Raff finds not on paper, but on desks and walls.