When public life stopped during the coronavirus lockdowns, German photographer Wolfgang Zurborn went back into his archive, to the analog color negatives he shot of crowds in the 1980s and 1990s. He digitized hundreds of them, and the result is Crowds, a 2026 photobook from Kehrer Verlag. PetaPixel ran a preview on September 19, 2026, and the publisher lists the title as available.
Zurborn has photographed people in public spaces for more than four decades. His interest is the small, unplanned stuff: encounters, gestures and coincidences that show how people behave once they are part of a group. For Crowds he pulled together pictures of political, sporting, religious, tourist and entertainment events. Many of these negatives have never been published before.
The captions give a sense of the ground covered:
- Wackersdorf, 1986
- Cologne, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1991
- Loreley, 1988
- Paris, 1989
What makes the pictures work is their refusal to pick a single subject. Zurborn comes out of the color street photography tradition, and he takes in the full visual noise of a public space instead of steering the eye to one hero element. People aren’t reduced to wallpaper behind a main subject, and they aren’t cut out as isolated portraits either. The frames are about relationships between individuals, the groups they belong to and the places around them. Kehrer Verlag calls the collection “a richly layered panorama of a society in transition.”
The timing gives the project a second layer. Zurborn has said that the enforced pause in an overstimulated mass culture made him rethink how social surroundings and media shape people, and whether a self-determined life is possible at all. Looking at dense, jostling crowds from the late 1980s at a moment when gatherings were banned turns the book into something more than nostalgia. It becomes a study of what a crowd actually is. The book doesn’t push one reading, though. The pictures are left open, and viewers are asked to look closely at the complex, contradictory and often chaotic structures of society.
The book at a glance
- Title: Wolfgang Zurborn: Crowds
- Publisher: Kehrer Verlag, 2026
- Text: interview by Alasdair Foster with Wolfgang Zurborn
- Language: German, English
- Pages: 272
- Illustrations: 131 color illustrations
- Format: 19.8 × 28 cm, softcover with open spine
- ISBN: 978-3-96900-259-9
- Price: €58.00
For anyone interested in how color film recorded everyday European life before smartphones got into every frame, Crowds is a dense and patient archive. Its subject is less any single event than the way people behave once there are a lot of them in one place.
