Over five years, across five countries and nine music festivals, I turned my camera away from the stage and toward the audience. What interested me was not the performance itself, but the collective experience unfolding in front of it. The crowd as a living, shifting organism made up of thousands of individual stories.
Music and society have always been closely linked, but festivals intensify that relationship. They become rites of passage. A single day can imprint memories that outlast the temporary stages and structures, affecting us physically, emotionally, and socially all at once. Few environments create such a concentrated expression of human connection.
I often think about this work from a future perspective. Decades from now, these images may read less as documentation of specific bands or events and more as an anthropological record. Festivals photographed include Wacken (Germany), Download (UK), Sonisphere (UK), Bloodstock (UK), Hellfest (France), Primavera (Spain), Big Day Out (Australia), and Soundwave (Australia).
