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.
