Street scenes: George Georgiou’s images of spectators at US parades
The British photographer’s new book picturing onlookers at events across the US in 2016 sheds an unexpected light on the fractured nature of contemporary American life
When the American photographer William Klein shot the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade in New York in the 1950s, he evoked the collective energy of the event in the blurred shapes of inflatables floating above the crowds and closeups of the faces of people watching from the sidewalk. In these images, all is blur and movement, an impressionistic glimpse of a parade that drew thousands of onlookers from the outer boroughs and beyond.
More than 60 years later, in 2016, the year of Donald Trump’s election, British photographer George Georgiou travelled across a very different United States, his itinerary dictated by parades, both national and local. He too photographed the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, but also many lesser-known annual gatherings such as the Mermaid parade in Coney Island, the Cranberry festival parade in Warrens, Wisconsin, and Marion County Country Ham Days Pigasus parade in Lebanon, Kentucky. From the off, his plan was not to capture the spectacle of the parades themselves but rather the more intimate theatre of the people lining the streets. “I set out with no big agenda,” he says, “but I knew the images would somehow speak volumes about contemporary America.” That they do, in ways both expected and surprising.