Wolfgang Zurborn — CROWDS

With CROWDS, published by Kehrer, Wolfgang Zurborn brings together photographs made in the 1980s and 1990s among crowds, parties and gatherings. The book contains 131 colour photographs found again in his archive during lockdown. Rather than following a chronology, the images are edited through visual connections.

What I like about Zurborn is the way he enters a crowd.
He is not necessarily looking for one person or a decisive moment. He looks at what happens between people.

He worked with medium format and flash, very close to his subjects. The result is dense and sometimes chaotic. Bodies overlap, gazes move in different directions, and several small scenes seem to exist within the same frame. Zurborn himself describes working at roughly one metre from the people he photographed. It naturally makes me think of Martin Parr, because of the flash and colour, but also of Tom Wood and his proximity to people. Yet Zurborn’s photographs feel less ironic to me. They remain open. We look at them and try to work out what is happening.

What strikes me most today is how these photographs have changed with time. They were not necessarily made as documents of an era. They have become documents. The clothes, colours and gestures place us in the 1980s and 1990s, but something remains very contemporary: the way people can be together while each person seems to be living inside their own small world.

“I want to question the central interests of human beings in a self-determined life.”

That is perhaps what I like most about documentary photography. We always photograph more than we think we are photographing. Zurborn was looking for pictures inside the crowd. Forty years later, those pictures also show us a way of being together that has changed.

And that is where CROWDS becomes interesting to me
not as a book about the past, but as a book that makes us look differently at the present.

Written by Kalel Koven
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Photographer’s links: Website – Instagram

Book available – Crowds, Wolfgang Zurborn.

Interview: Alasdair Foster
Design: Wolfgang Zurborn and Kehrer Design
Exhibition at Galerie Lichtblick, Cologne, from 3 October to 22 November 2026.
CROWDS, KEHRER VERLAG, 2026.