‘It’s a re-creation of a day at the races in 1955. The guy on the bottom left is telling off-colour jokes and the woman is clearly offended’
I created this image of a 1955 scene at Vancouvers Hastings Park racing track in 2008. It was one of three shots of different crowds I planned in the race up to a bigger commission approximately the city’s 1971 Gastown riot. The images form a series entitled Crowds and Riots – from workers being unionised in the 1930s to police in the 1970s corralling protesters,they deal with the creation of a particular group. The Hastings Racecourse crowd were emblematic of the postwar period, when the advent of consumerism provided a way of rebuilding the economy. It showed the newly created middle lesson: people who were making things being able to buy those things, and a sort of perpetual motion machine for capitalism.
My work had mostly focused on landscapes and locations – settings where there was no particular action,though the possibility of action was always there. I hadn’t really photographed people at all. The Gastown project was going to cost approximately half a million dollars, so I needed to create sure I knew what I was doing.
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Source: guardian.co.uk