All Together Now

Photographs by Neal Slavin

Constraints can be liberating. My father was a cartoonist, and at public events, he’d ask someone to put three big marks on a piece of paper—lines, squiggles, blotches—and then tell him what to draw: a house, a horse, a flower. Somehow, he could always do it—but the angle and approach would be unexpected.

That memory returned as I explored the forthcoming revised edition of Neal Slavin’s When Two or More Are Gathered Together, first published almost half a century ago. Here’s the constraint: The photos are all group shots. The genre has a bad reputation, picked up from too many uninspired high-school yearbooks, corporate brochures, and family-reunion albums. Slavin wanted to pursue wilder game while remaining smack in the realm of the ordinary: hot-dog vendors, bodybuilders, cheerleaders, synchronized swimmers, Elizabeth Arden masseuses, Santa’s Helpers, Biltmore Hotel chambermaids, fire-department chaplains. (The new edition has some 120 images, roughly half of which were taken after the book’s original 1976 publication.)

Slavin gave his subjects an overarching instruction: You decide how to pose yourselves. The mandate proved revolutionary. The resulting photographs possess rare animation and humor, the subjects’ self-arrangement adding an extra layer of revelation. DeLorean owners wave at the camera from inside their vehicles, gull-wing doors up. Uniformed cemetery workers smile shyly, shovels in hand, beside a freshly dug hole in the ground.

Why group shots? I asked Slavin, now in his 80s. He has always considered himself something of a sociologist, he said. For many people, America calls to mind the freestanding individual—our national myth. But groups, Slavin said, are the true foundation of the country. He cited Alexis de Tocqueville, who famously observed that, in America, people propulsively associate with one another. And when people make decisions as a group—in this case, about a photograph—you get energy, Slavin said: You “can’t press the button unless you have that energy coming at the camera.”

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “All Together Now.”