[Lifestyle] Trekkies to twins: Eight photos of the quirkiest groups in 70s and 80s US

[Wolf.17]

 

Celebrating "the joy of being together ", here are eight group portraits – taken by photographer Neal Slavin between 1972 and 1991 – that show both togetherness and peculiarity in US life.

It's 50 years since photographer Neal Slavin began travelling around the US documenting the nation's diverse – and often bizarre – group gatherings. To mark the anniversary, a new edition of this body of work, When Two or More are Gathered Together, has just been published.

Slavin's subjects, he writes, "affirm the joy of being together rather than being apart", and reveal the many different ways that people find common ground. A broad sweep of society is depicted: bingo players, stockbrokers, chambermaids and gravediggers. Some groups, such as the Tall Social Club, invite normality into the marginal; others share passions, from penny farthing bicycles to bodybuilding.  

Slavin likes his subjects to pose as they want to, allowing natural hierarchies and group dynamics to come to the fore. "I watch individuals who jockey for position, thrusting a shoulder in front of the next person or wearing the widest smile, while others recede into the background, who are posing only to be a part of something larger – the group," he writes in the book.

When the first images were published in 1976, the book became a landmark work, indicating the potential of the new medium of colour photography. Now, with 54 additional photos, some taken as recently as 2023, Slavin's celebration of togetherness in an increasingly individualistic digital age feels especially relevant. Here are eight highlights from the book.

 

The Capitol Wrestling Corporation photo shoot in Washington DC, chosen as the front cover of the book, had Slavin full of anticipation. "My father and I used to watch this kind of wrestling on Channel 11, so when it came time to find these guys, I was absolutely elated," the Brooklyn-born photographer tells the BBC. He had hoped to shoot the men in action, but a scheduled event meant that they got "shunted over to the boys' locker room". Shaking hands with Gorilla Monsoon (top right) proved to be an event in itself. "His hand was bigger than my head," Slavin jokes. But for all their brawn and hammed-up bravado, "the camaraderie between them was incredible," he says. "They talked about everything, and I think that's what made the picture."

 

"I love that picture," says Slavin of his photo of a bingo club in St Petersburg, Florida. "For me it just reeks of straight-to-the-heart humanity. It's not humorous: it's human." The players sit in the same seat every time they get together, yet they all crowd in to be in the picture. "They want to be marked down that they were there and at a certain time in history," explains Slavin. "There's a social fabric among all these people," he adds, pointing out their varied responses to the camera. Some have their chests out, others are hunched over, and some are standing up to be seen. "That's what I look for. When I'm at my best, I've found the narrative in the group, and it's fascinating."

Slavin asked these Los Angeles yogis to assume a number of positions before settling on this headstand. Here, the fruits of colour photography are clear, but it had taken some time for Slavin and others to topple a pervasive snobbery that favoured monochrome. "We broke the barrier," he says. It was the additional information that colour supplied that most appealed to him. "That opened up an entire world for me that was absolutely amazing," he says. Slavin – ever the outsider – was both bemused and fascinated by the yogis. He references the 19th-Century historian and sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville who observed that, in contrast to his home country of France, Americans instinctively form groups for almost every aspect of life, forging mini democracies. Slavin fears that the digital age threatens the physicality of these connections. "It's interrupting that very basic tribalism that we have survived on for millennia, and I lament that," he says.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241101-weird-and-wonderful-gatherings-in-the-us