This is a project of the artist Laura Napier.
Since 2003, I’ve photographed and collected newspaper clippings of places in cities where passerby create temporary lines or circles, or crowds often form. Cultural norms and the architecture of urban street spaces define these spontaneous formations. For example, in Lima, Peru, people tend to line up at the very edge of the curb, up to fifteen people abreast, waiting to cross a busy street. In Manhattan, one can go downtown on a weekday, in the late afternoon, to Trinity Place and see commuters forming a perfectly spaced line as they wait for express buses.
Take Me There, a field guide to crowd formations of manhattan and the bronx lists locations where these formations predictably occur, and is available as an online PDF download and as a printed takeaway brochure.
We can learn something about ourselves as a society and as a species simply by looking; this motivates my work.
location 1
2003
location 2
2003
location 3
2006
location 4
2005
location 5
2005
location 6
June 6, 2008
location 7
June 6, 2008
another express bus line
at vesey street and north end ave, June 2, 2008
new location
car free pedestrian area for experiments