I have been shooting music festivals for promoters for many years. One day I was standing on a boomlift, high above the crowd and took a break from shooting the artists on the stage. Looking back at the crowd, I knew I had found my subject for a series of personal works.
In order to get the images to convey the feeling of looking at such a scene, I shot them on 8×10 film, so that the prints would be “overloaded” with information.
Although the image is filled with people, I think of it as a landscape. The space is both natural and artificial, an empty hill and a seething crowd. It is a space designed to be filled. The space creates a crowd and the crowd transform the space.
What interests me is the relationships between the individuals; the way they arrange themselves in a defined area and create a mass, like atoms composing an element. Their clothes speak a language. So do their tattoos and their make up, their muscles and breast implants.
Although it stands alone, this image also forms the left panel of a diptych with my other submission, Brisbane II.
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