People embrace at a festival, a woman unloads her Mercedes next to a demolished house, families push prams through an artificial leisure world. Something is happening everywhere – and more often than not, several things are happening at once.
For more than four decades, Wolfgang Zurborn has been looking at places where people come together. Not necessarily at the main event itself, but preferably at what happens beside it, behind it and right in the middle of it. His new photobook, Crowds, published by Kehrer Verlag, takes us through more than 40 years of public life – part social study, part journey through time, and at the same time a highly entertaining visual puzzle book for adults.
Zurborn’s settings range from political, sporting and religious events to fairs, tourist attractions, amusement parks and other places of collective entertainment. But anyone looking for the decisive moment may well be looking in the wrong place.
Because it is precisely the incidental details that make these photographs so compelling: a gesture, a glance, a peculiar piece of clothing, an advertising billboard in the background, or two people who, for a fraction of a second, form an involuntary choreography. Foreground and background are constantly competing for attention. The eye jumps around the images, discovering stories on the second or third viewing that seemed not to be there at first glance.
Wolfgang Zurborn is interested neither in the anonymous “crowd” nor in the completely isolated individual. Instead, his photographs reveal how people react to one another, to their surroundings, and to the images and messages they are constantly confronted with. Advertising, architecture, fashion, cars, media and bodies collide in a visual jumble that, remarkably, keeps finding an order of its own.
Ironically, the starting point for Crowds came at a time when gatherings of people had suddenly disappeared. During the Covid pandemic, Zurborn began revisiting his archive and digitising hundreds of analogue colour negatives. Images from the 1980s encountered more recent work – creating unexpected connections across the decades. That is also what makes the book particularly fascinating today. Fashion and hairstyles change, cars disappear, advertising messages grow old and leisure worlds acquire new backdrops. Human behaviour, on the other hand, can seem surprisingly familiar.
Across 272 pages, Crowds brings together 131 colour photographs spanning more than four decades. The book was designed by Wolfgang Zurborn together with Kehrer Design, while an interview between Alasdair Foster and Wolfgang Zurborn complements the photographic journey. And perhaps that is the greatest pleasure of Crowds: at first you look at the crowd – and eventually find yourself captivated by a single person.
Wolfgang Zurborn – Crowds
Interview: Alasdair Foster with Wolfgang Zurborn
Design: Wolfgang Zurborn & Kehrer Design
Softcover with open binding
19.8 × 28 cm, 272 pages, 131 colour illustrations
German / English, ISBN 978-3-96900-259-9, €58
Wolfgang Zurborn, born in 1956, studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Fotografie in Munich and at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences. In 1985, he received the Otto Steinert Scholarship from the German Photographic Society. Together with Tina Schelhorn, he has run Galerie Lichtblick in Cologne since 1986; in 2010, he founded the Lichtblick School. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he has taught photography in Germany and abroad.
