Crowds
Masses of people, from festival throngs and racecourses to rallies, commuters and ravers.
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About
A crowd becomes a subject when individuals merge into a mass: worshippers, spectators, marchers or commuters. Picturing one means choosing between the swarm and the single face. Pieter Bruegel the Elder solved it by scattering hundreds of small, busy figures across The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559), each absorbed in a task.
Victorian painters liked legible multitudes: William Powell Frith's The Derby Day (1856–58) is a catalogue of social types at the racecourse. James Ensor turned the mass into grotesque carnival in Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), where the central figure almost vanishes among masks and banners. L. S. Lowry filled northern English streets with stick-like figures streaming to the mill or the match. Photography scaled things up: Andreas Gursky's large prints of trading floors and techno raves turn thousands of people into pattern, and Katrin Korfmann builds composite images of people seen from directly above.
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Eye Contact
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Face
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