Faces in the Crowd

Through my photos I focus on being an observer, focusing on crowds to capture authentic emotions.  I place myself at events that gather crowds, but instead of documenting the event, I flip the camera to focus on the human reactions running through the crowd.  By shifting my focus from the event to the peoples’ reactions, I’m creating a sense of mystery as to what the reactions are in response to, forcing my viewers to begin making inferences and crafting their own story in their head.  One of the central inquiries in my work is the duality of perspectives.  I seek to both isolate individuals in parts of the crowd and capture the collection of unique individuals that make it a whole.  My goal is to blur the boundaries between these perspectives, highlighting both at once.  In this way, my viewers, and myself, are challenged to look beyond the surface level and notice individual stories intertwined in the masses.  Through my photography, I am redefining the relationship between audience and event by shifting the focus from the spectacle itself to the reactions that shape it. In doing so, I challenge viewers to see events not just as performances, but as shared human experiences woven together by individual emotions.  I began my sustained investigation with portrait photography, aiming to capture emotion through individual expressions. However, I quickly realized that while portraits could convey personal depth, they often felt staged or isolated, lacking the raw, unscripted emotions I was seeking. More importantly, they didn’t fully capture the shared human experience, the connection between people that unifies my images. Through experimentation, I shifted my focus to social documentary photography, specifically emphasizing crowds and audience reactions. Instead of controlling a subject in a portrait, I placed myself in organic, unscripted environments, allowing emotions to unfold naturally. I began photographing people experiencing moments together—cheering, waiting, reacting—to highlight the unifying emotions that tie us together through a collective experience.  Through practice and revision, I refined my focus to candid moments, body language, and fleeting facial expressions rather than posed imagery. This shift allowed me to create images that not only document emotion authentically but also explore the shared humanity within public spaces, ultimately fulfilling my original vision in a more powerful way.