Picture Show: Places of Education

This week, as children and young people all over the country return to school from their summer vacations, we turn our attention to some educational locales in Massachusetts. We often think of the Bay State as being home to a number of the nation's oldest most venerable educational institutions, and it is. Yet for her visual exploration, "Places of Education," the photographer Lissa Rivera canvased an array of the state's public and private schools, universities, Greek societies, and community colleges, focusing on the interiors of buildings themselves rather than the students. In so doing, she captured a number of captivating images that speak loudly about the settings we assemble for the purpose of learning.

"In some of the private schools there's this sort of constructed sense of history or expectation, with all those portraits watching over the students," says Rivera. "But I didn't go into the project with an agenda or a specific juxtaposition in mind. I just wanted to see what was inside some of these places."

What follows is a selection from Lissa Rivera's "Places of Education."