Crowded Fields – revisited

Boston-based photographer Pelle Cass attempts to show us what time would look like if everything happens at once by creating composite photographs that elaborately distil a time span of several hours in a single action packed image. Having honed his skills as a “still time-lapse photographer” in his Selected People series, where he captured the streets, plazas and parks of his hometown of Boston, he turned to sports for his ongoing series, Crowded Fields.
From college football and lacrosse fields, to basketball and tennis courts, to fencing pistes, diving pools and ice hockey rings, the sport arenas that Cass depicts are teeming with athletes in mid-action. But what makes the photographs stand out is their plausibility: despite being utterly illusory, they look incredibly real. That’s because Cass never moves a figure or doctors a single pixel, he only decides what stays in and what’s left out, a painstaking photoshopping process that can take several days for just one image.
The result is a series of uncanny photographs whose apparent disorder belie an intricately choreographed order.