’80s Student Life of a Massachusetts High School Through Amazing Black and White Photos

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Olive Pierce (1925-2016) was a documentary photographer based in Massachusetts and Maine. The collection comprises several hundred black-and-white photographic prints taken by Pierce over her long career. The earliest images (1960s) feature landscapes and individuals in Maine, a subject Pierce returned to throughout her life. Other subjects include: political protests in Cambridge, Massachusetts and life in the Jefferson Park neighborhood in Cambridge during the 1970s; high school students in Cambridge (1980s); the lives of Iraqi children in war zones in 1999 and 2003, and protests in the U.S. against that war.

Student life in the 1980s taken by Olive Pierce

Also included are print publications featuring Pierce’s photographs; publicity for exhibits and lectures; Pierce’s 1987 guide to teaching photography; a video on DVD and audio lecture about her work; some correspondence; unpublished book mock-ups and a memoir/diary; a self-published illustrated partial memoir (2014); approximately 2557 film negatives; and about 40 slides featuring images of her early life and family. Acquired by the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.

This series from Cambridge Room at the Cambridge Public Library contains photographs that Olive Pierce took during her tenure as the photography teacher at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. For three years, she photographed students and the resulting work was published in No Easy Roses: A Look at the Lives of City Teenagers (1986).