For his third monograph, “ The Children’s Melody ,” the photographer Eli Durst returned to his elementary school in Austin, Texas. The New Deal-era building appeared remarkably unchanged, except for all the laptops. The cafeteria smelled the same. One of his former teachers was still there, coaxing students to line up neatly. “I felt like I was eight years old again,” Durst told me.

Durst likes to take pictures of activities—the shared, structured experiences that are neither work nor purely play. His first book, “ The Community ,” began as a project exploring church basements and then expanded to include other multipurpose spaces that served as the setting for Bible-study groups but also for Boy Scout meetings, team-building exercises, and community-theatre rehearsals. These everyday

See Full Page