Youthful joy & end-of-era poignancy at a London school prom

Leavers — For several years, Lewis Khan documented young people as they celebrated the last of their school days and the completion of their exams. The series is now collated in a new self-published photobook and short film.

The protagonists of Lewis Khan’s Leavers revel in a cloak of youth-shaped exuberance. Draped in sequins and silk or adorned with a bowtie and sunglasses – one teenager wears a sash pronouncing him ‘Prom King’, others don the traditional dress of their home lives – these young people appear confident, oftentimes euphoric and occasionally serious (but ultimately comfortable), embracing the kind of party atmosphere uniquely fuelled by exams being over. A soft glow, courtesy of the photographer’s preferred use of medium format and Super 8, underscores the gravity of the moment, between the end of school and what comes next. “It’s a moment of joy and celebration,” reflects Khan.

The near-decade long project first took shape, loosely, in July 2017 when the photographer accompanied his mum on a night time stroll around their neighbourhood in Vauxhall, south London. It was the type of local walk that doesn’t entertain any real objective, recalls Khan, “No direction, just soaking things up.” At some point they noticed groups of teenagers spilling out of a nearby school: their shiny suits and glittering frocks generating a spectacle in an otherwise grey landscape of concrete and traffic. His interest piqued, Khan reached out to the school via a friend’s mum who taught there, and arranged to shoot the following year’s event.

Despite its popularity in the UK growing substantially in the past few decades, prom remains largely an American phenomenon for many, witnessed predominantly through TV and film, where the lead characters are generally white and typically depicted as middle or upper middle class. Khan, who grew up in the area, doesn’t recall his own secondary school ever hosting a prom. “I don’t think it had the resources,” he says. “I would have gone to it though. And if my old school ever does do a prom, I would love to photograph it.” In his work however, there’s a sense of familiarity about the occasion; a recognisable intimacy that betrays the specificity of the scene. Now, following an exhibition at 1014 gallery in Dalston earlier this year, the photographer has self-published a book of his prom pictures.

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Beyond the project’s strong visual component, there’s an important social factor and a cultural significance that Khan observed early on, which quickly became a central motivation for returning every year. “I’ve grown up knowing teenagers to be treated with suspicion and contempt,” he shares, referencing the ASBO era. Entering his teens in the early 2000s, the photographer remembers well the controversy of anti-social behaviour orders, which arrived with Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1998 – introduced as part of the Crime and Disorder Act – and how they coincided with a culture of councils rescinding resources like youth clubs for teenagers. “At the same time, they were installing high frequency audio signals in public places that only younger people could hear, making those spaces inhospitable.

“It created this sense that young people weren’t to be supported or understood, but managed and moved on,” he continues. “Those attitudes were often mapped onto existing social and racial inequalities, which you can see reflected in patterns of systemic racism, for example police stop and search figures in areas like Lambeth [where the school is], which disproportionately affect Black boys and men.” Leavers then, becomes a counternarrative, challenging negative stereotypes perpetuated by biased newspaper headlines. As Khan observes, “The prom felt like a beautiful antidote. A space of self-worth and pride.”

In his photographs, made with a pronounced sense of care, Khan reframes both what a prom can look like and how teenagers from inner-city London state schools are perceived; the scenes are joyful and the environment feels kind, as friends and classmates dance, joke, and encourage one another. There is a sense that judgement – both the sort presented in classic teen movies with high-stakes proms, and the kind found in ‘only three school children at a time’ signs in London corner shops – has been removed for a night.

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This sentiment is amplified in an accompanying short film, made in 2022, which features a specially-written poem by former Young People’s Laureate Caleb Femi, who grew up in Peckham in the neighbouring borough of Southwark. With Glass, which Femi recites alongside Lara George’s ‘Dansaki’, his words affect a kinship with the young people in Khan’s images, further sharpening the context in which they celebrate and the significance of their coming together; elsewhere a teacher makes this feeling explicit, tenderly announcing: “The most important thing is, through it all, you have made it to today. Whatever you went through – whatever you didn’t go through – somehow you are here today, and that is a celebration.”

Prior to Khan’s Dalston show, which marked his first solo exhibition, in spring last year Khan presented Leavers at photo festival Peckham24, while in September it travelled to Poland as part of Night of Photography with the Museum of Warsaw. “The response has been really generous,” he says today. “What’s stood out is how people connect – in Peckham there’s a familiarity with it being local, but even in places like Poland people still relate through their own memories of youth and moments of transition. That’s probably been the biggest surprise – how universal those feelings are, despite the work being so rooted in a specific place.”