It isn’t really the building, but the students that make the school.

In a previous life as a teacher at a junior high school in Okinawa, Japan I noticed that the building changed fundamentally as an environment, becoming hollow and resonant in the absence of the student body during the winter vacation.

Vacant corridors and classrooms seeming to be on the verge of suddenly being filled making uncanny, expectant atmospheres as though spaces couldn't bear to be empty. The building itself almost seemed to be in stasis, awaiting the return of the students for time to flow.

I became absorbed by the difference in sound and light as well as smell and feeling of space, compared with the atmosphere I had become accustomed to with the melee of teenagers filling it bodily and creating noise, smells, vibration and energy.

Despite their emptiness, the spaces still bore testament to the absent occupants. These traces - furniture in disarray, scuffs on the floors, scratches on desks, burnished banisters and patinaed surfaces themselves document the passage of the students and their lingering presence.

This photographic essay forms the basis for a series of prints exhibited at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in July 2010