I attended a friend's wedding over the summer. I brought my 4x5 camera and photographed parts of the ceremony with it. As a result, I came home with massively detailed images of the event. As I looked closely at them, I could see every face in the photos and was fascinated by the different relationships and reactions I saw. Seeing the dynamics of people within a crowd was so interesting I wanted to continue with it. I took more pictures of crowds and experimented with different ways to encourage the same close looking I enjoyed with my friend's wedding pictures. I started by making the images black and white to reduce the potential for distraction and visual noise that color brings. I then started selecting the faces and deleting everything in the background, forcing the viewer to focus on faces rather than any distractions. I then started enlarging the images to massive 7ft print sizes so that every face could be easily seen. I then tried color-coding the photographs so that groups of people/faces were organized into groups. I refuse to tell the viewers what these categories are to force them to consider their own categories when attempting to figure out the patterns. The work isn’t made with a central narrative or meaning behind it. Instead, it followed my intuitive interest in its process. I kept returning to the work, and every time I looked at it with someone they would have a fresh perspective and interpretation of the work.
The most common reading is as a commentary on surveillance. I don’t consider this a commentary or critique of surveillance but instead a reappropriation of its methods with notably different intent. Surveillance controls, tracks, exploits and reduces people to data points. Most surveillance is created to flatten the humanity of its subjects to a point in a dataset or the answer to a question. Additionally, a crowd can also act as a dehumanizing entity. At a certain point, a group of people blends into an amorphous blob rather than a collection of individuals, with a handful of exceptions at best. By applying and modifying surveillance methods, this project enables a crowd to be observed as a collection of distinct people with whom the viewer can individually engage. Additionally, encouraging pattern recognition through color coding allows the crowd to be seen as a singular entity with distinct ebbs, flows, and structures, bringing more life/to the crowd entity.