Pull the Pin Senior day, coloured smoke as home-made weather
Every spring the senior classes take the football field for a day: matching department shirts, drums, vuvuzelas, chanting from the stands, and an armful of coloured smoke flares. The folders call it a photosession. It isn't. It is crowd coverage of a controlled riot in harsh Cairo midday sun, flat overhead light and a thousand people in identical T-shirts, which produces almost nothing. Until somebody pulls the pin.
The smoke is the only thing on that field that shapes light, gives depth, separates a body from the two hundred behind it, and turns a group photo into a photograph. So this project is about the smoke: what it does to a crowd, what a person looks like standing inside weather they made on purpose, and how small all of it is on a very large green field.
Smoke as Weather
Pull the pin and the air becomes a material. For about forty seconds you can hold colour in your hand, and everyone knows to look.
The Stand, and Who's in It
Four hundred people in the same shirt, the pink cloud rolling over all of them at once, and somewhere in the noise, always one person who has gone quiet.
The Field
Step back far enough and the whole thing is a few marks on a lot of grass. A man carrying a giant white C, a lone figure before the class letters, a cap that asks NOW WHAT?
