Orit Raff

This work is from Orit Raff’s photographic and sculptural installation, Inside Drawing. As scholar Esther Gabara has described in her 2000 essay on the series, “In photographs culled from a number of schools in New York, Raff presents evidence of a key moment in the shaping of meaning: when the child leaves home, abandoning the domestic realm for the social sphere of school.” Raff’s photographs show desks “inscribed by years of students’ use,” where the carved writing is “sometimes a name, a message, or simply abstract lines that become arrows, geometrical shapes, pyramids.”