When the American photographer William Klein shot the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade in New York in the 1950s, he evoked the collective energy of the event in the blurred shapes of inflatables floating above the crowds and closeups of the faces of people watching from the sidewalk. In these images, all is blur and movement, an impressionistic glimpse of a parade that drew thousands of onlookers from the outer boroughs and beyond.
More than 60 years later, in 2016, the year of Donald Trump’s election, British photographer George Georgiou travelled across a very different United States, his itinerary dictated by parades, both national and local. He too photographed the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, but also many lesser-known annual gatherings such as the Mermaid parade in Coney Island, the Cranberry festival parade in Warrens, Wisconsin, and Marion County Country Ham Days Pigasus parade in Lebanon, Kentucky. From the off, his plan was not to capture the spectacle of the parades themselves but rather the more intimate theatre of the people lining the streets. “I set out with no big agenda,” he says, “but I knew the images would somehow speak volumes about contemporary America.” That they do, in ways both expected and surprising.
The result of his 13,000-mile odyssey through 24 cities and 14 states is the photo book Americans Parade. Most immediately apparent to the outsider’s eye is how deeply segregated the crowds are at these supposedly communal rituals. More often than not, they comprise gatherings of black people or of white people; seldom do the two communities commingle.
“In New Orleans, I photographed two Mardi Gras parades,” Georgiou says. “The first, which took place in the morning in the Algiers district, was predominantly black. The second, in the afternoon, was a sea of middle-class, white families. In both places, everyone was friendly and welcoming, but it does hit you that they are worlds apart, even when they are supposedly celebrating the same occasion. It was quite a shock to me.”
In the bigger cities, where the parades tend to be celebrations of America – Thanksgiving, Independence Day – or expressions of ethnicity or identity – St Patrick’s Day, Gay Pride, Martin Luther King Day – the onlookers seem more energised and more affluent. Many people are holding iPhones or expensive cameras. Elsewhere, in the small towns and cities of the heartlands and the south, people seem less buoyant, as if bonded, if at all, by a sense of duty rather than community. Everywhere, the ubiquity of branded American sportswear is evident.
On the morning of a parade, Georgiou would position himself on the pavement just ahead of the starting point, and, as the procession moved forward, he did too. A few times he was questioned by police officers, and found himself having to patiently explain his project as the parade passed by him. The locals tended to be politely curious or ignore him altogether. “The people reveal a lot about a place,” he says, “and you soon realise that America is a vast country full of small, quite insular communities, whose interests and priorities tend to be extremely local.”
In terms of composition, Georgiou’s monochrome group portraits are alike but each one is brimful of telling detail. “I wanted each image to be formally similar but to capture the small things that reveal a lot – body language, glances and gestures. Often, what I also captured was the general atmosphere of the day, which ranged from excited expectancy to boredom.”
Georgiou would regularly drive through neighbourhoods that were utterly deserted of pedestrians the day before the parade. He has included some of these unpeopled urban landscapes in the book. “There was often an eerie emptiness,” he says. “I wanted to give an idea of that sense of human emptiness many American towns have because people drive everywhere.”
Sometimes, as was the case in Lafayette, Louisiana, that social landscape altered dramatically as the celebrations for Martin Luther King Day began in earnest with barbecues and street gatherings. “In the American south, you sense that parades don’t so much bring different communities together as give one community a sense of visibility and pride in itself,” says Georgiou.
The idea to use parades as a way to explore the national psyche came to Georgiou as he was travelling across the United States in 2013. Back then, he had taken time out to assist his wife and fellow photographer, Vanessa Winship, while she was shooting her acclaimed series She Dances on Jackson. “I stopped taking photographs for a time,” he says, “and, in retrospect, that was a really productive thing to do insofar as it gave me time to think. Otherwise, I would have been too angry about what was going on. Throughout those trips, what we were hearing was this constant rightwing rhetoric that was so depressing.”
That rhetoric was reaching a kind of crescendo when Georgiou visited the US again in January 2016, as the most brutally combative American election campaign of recent times was under way. “I’m an optimist,” he says, “but it was hard not to be affected by it, and by the sense of how utterly divided America is, and how insular it can be once you leave the major cities. The people in many of these communities feel like they belong completely to one local place. It’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist.”
In this context, Americans Parade, from its deftly chosen title to its formally democratic approach, is a book that repays close scrutiny. It is a portrait of not one America, but myriad often contradictory Americas. Perhaps, it was ever thus, but those contradictions – of class, race, economics and ideologies – seem starker than ever.
• Americans Parade by George Georgiou is available from georgegeorgiou.net
