How these pictures were made

No child appears in any photograph on this site

Not one, anywhere, and it was a deliberate choice rather than an oversight or a matter of taste. A school whose customers are children is the last place a synthetic image of one belongs. It is not a matter of degree: a picture does not become acceptable by being tasteful, by being distant, or by showing a child from behind. There is no such picture on this site because there was never going to be one.

Every photograph here was generated, and no child is in any of them. Every photograph on this website was generated by a computer for this demonstration. No child appears in any of them — deliberately, because a school whose customers are children is the last place that a synthetic image of one belongs. Where a person is shown, they are an adult and they are nobody.

What is photographed instead

What this site shows is the room the children are not in: the empty studio, the barre, the sprung floor, light through a high window, the shoes lined up on the bench, the instruments on their stands, the stage set before a recital, the auditorium before the seats fill.

• The studios and the sprung floors, empty
• The barre, the mirror wall, the marley floor in Studio C
• Shoes on the bench, and practice clothes, with no maker's mark in focus
• The piano, the guitars, the violins, on their stands
• The stage before a recital, and the auditorium before the audience arrives

Where a person does appear, they are an adult, and they are nobody

Across the whole of this site, thirteen photographs show a person at all: the staff portraits, one photograph of the group, and a small number of adult-class and adult age-group pictures. Every one of those people is an adult, and every one of them is nobody — a face generated for this demonstration rather than a photograph of anybody who exists. Nowhere on this site is there a photograph of a class in progress.

No sign over our own door

There is no photograph of this school's own frontage anywhere on this site, which for a building with a name over the door is a decision rather than an accident. There is no notice board, no timetable pinned to a wall, and no certificate in any frame — which is also the honest picture, since this school does not hold or display one.

Why there is no certificate to photograph

Sheet music and instrument makers' marks, kept soft on purpose

Printed music is text, and a generated close-up of a real page of notation would have to invent a title, a composer and a copyright line that belong to nobody. Every page of music on this site is shot at a shallow enough depth of field that the staves read as grey lines and nothing on them resolves into a word.

A guitar has a maker's name on the headstock, a piano has one on the fallboard, and a violin carries a paper label inside the body that a raking light finds — and there is no way to photograph any of those instruments properly with the mark removed, because an instrument without one is not a believable instrument. So the mark is kept out of the frame instead: guitars are shot between the nut and the soundhole with the headstock outside the picture, the piano is shot from above the keys with the fallboard out of shot, and the violin is shot from an angle steep enough that the scroll stays soft.