In Crowds, Wolfgang Zurborn returns to his colour archive from the 1980s and 1990s and reassembles it as a dense panorama of public life. The project took shape during the Covid lockdowns, when gatherings had largely disappeared: Zurborn scanned hundreds of analogue colour negatives and began to see, across decades, recurring gestures, affinities and tensions he had not fully recognised when the pictures were made. Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2026, the book brings that archive together for the first time as a single body of work.

The photographs were taken in the thick of festivals, protests, religious processions, fairgrounds, tourist sites and other places of collective attention, mainly in Germany and France. Zurborn’s street-photography approach refuses a single hero or a neat centre. People remain embedded in social structures and media noise; they neither dissolve into an anonymous mass nor stand apart as isolated portraits. Colour, layering and the choreography of bodies do the work of storytelling, inviting the eye to move between foreground detail and the wider crowd.

What first appears chaotic gradually discloses a quieter visual order, without cancelling the unpredictability that gives these scenes their charge. An interview with curator Alasdair Foster accompanies the photographs, situating the work within Zurborn’s long interest in how individuals negotiate belonging, desire and self-determination inside collective situations. The sequencing follows rhythm and body language rather than a linear map of places and dates, so that echoes between distant events become part of the reading.

Crowds arrives at a moment when the work is also visible in public. An exhibition at Galerie Lichtblick in Cologne presents the project alongside the publication, and Zurborn is scheduled for a book signing at Paris Photo on 12 November 2026. Together, the book and exhibition offer a timely look at how colour street photography can hold complexity, and how an archive, revisited under pressure, can still speak to the present.