We love Dougal Gorman here at Monster Children.

He is our resident band and event photographer. Shooting almost every event we hold and some of our favourite bands. Now, Dougal is on the cusp of releasing his latest book and exhibition, CROWDED, a series of crowd photos he has shot at punk shows in Australia over the last six years. Photos that highlight the fun, excitement and sometimes painful moments that happen within the chaos of a crowd at a punk show. From the crowd surfers to those enjoying the music up the back and everyone in between, the series is a celebration of the scenes and communities that surround the shows. You might be able to even spot yourself in a photo or two. 

CROWDED is opening at the Pass~Port Store and Gallery on the 20th of November from 6-8pm and if you can’t make it to the opening night, the show will be up in the gallery until the new year, with the book also being available to buy at the Pass~Port Store and Gallery. 

What is the concept of the series?

It’s called CROWDED and it is purely photos of crowds over the last six years. It is only of crowds within Australia, which I think is a nice nod to where I am from and what I started shooting. I didn’t want to involve international crowds, I wanted to keep it personal and in my own backyard. There is a lot of crazy shit in there, but I also tried to not just put photos of people doing flips and kicking people in the head, I wanted to diversify everything.

It sounds really cool.

It has been fun to stick to one simple concept and roll with it.

Was there anything that made you want to do a show based on crowd photos?

Yeah, shooting photos of crowds is something that I have been really into and been doing a lot. I like to shoot crowds as much as I like to shoot the people on stage, sometimes even more. The stage stuff can get a bit monotonous and same-same, depending on who you see of course, but people in crowds are always different, there are people of all different walks of life and people with different energy. There is always something interesting going on within a crowd.

For sure. It’s a great idea, every show has different crowds and there is always something cool going on.

It’s also funny, there are a lot of the same crowds in my photos too which is something that I only noticed going back through all of them. It’ll be like there is that same girl in this photo and in this one from three years ago. That makes it cool too having a Where’s Wally moment spotting who is in what photo. I think people will be pretty stoked to see themselves or some of their friends in the photos, it involves the whole community which is nice.

It also documents an era so well, the people who are there, what they are wearing and how they are acting. Looking back at these photos in a decade will be cool seeing how things have changed and how they haven’t.

Yeah, totally. There were a bunch of shows that I shot during Covid, and I was thinking about putting the photos in as a little nod, photos of people sitting down and watching gigs, but I didn’t really want to make it about that. It is always changing and evolving, there is always something different going on at these shows, so it is nice to put them together in a series.

What are you looking for in a crowd photo?

I had so many photos, so I printed them all out at Officeworks on A6 paper to go through them all and loosely categorise them. The first things that I am looking for are ‘Wow factor’, that sort of holy shit style moment where you are like, ‘What is going on here’. It might be someone front flipping off a speaker into a crowd or someone getting kicked in the face. Then I broke things into other categories like, ‘Faces’ and ‘People’, that may just be someone interesting looking with a certain expression or emotion on their face because I don’t want it to all be about pain and destruction. There is more to it than that. Also ‘Crowded’ photos in general, lots of arms and legs; a bit more of an abstract view on things. I wanted to include a good variety rather than it just being about chaos.

Do you have a favourite photo from the series?

Yeah, there are four images that are my favourites and I have got them as big A1 sized prints on the main wall of the gallery. One of them is of a big crowd with someone who has fallen on the ground and people are helping pick him up but down in the corner someone’s foot is on his ankle and you can see that he is in agony, which I didn’t see at the time. When I looked back at that photo later it looked like his ankle was getting broken, he was clearly in so much pain. Then to add to the madness there is water all over the floor because that venue was flooding, it was at some janky pub in Newcastle, so all the rain from outside was leaking in. That is a pretty crazy one where you have to look at the photo a bit more to assess the scene, there is so much going on.  

It's funny with crowd photos, they’re so different to shooting what is on stage. When you’re shooting the band on stage you basically know what you’ve shot but with a crowd photo you think you’re shooting one thing and not realise everything else going on.

A hundred per cent. A quarter of the photos in the series are happy accidents really. As you said there is so much going on and you think you’re shooting a photo of someone jumping but you’ve misfocused on that person jumping and focused on someone’s face in the background, now they’re the new subject in the photo. There are so many moving parts to the crowd. It makes for a fun environment to shoot in because you don’t know what you’re going to see or get a photo of.

Yeah, exactly. It is so unpredictable, when you’re shooting a band on stage you pretty much know what is going to happen, maybe the guitarist will do the same move they did the last time or they’re going to do something at this point of the song. Where with the crowd you have no idea what they’re going to do.

Yeah, I think that is also why I chose this concept. I have shot a lot of bands multiple times, so the stage photos do get a bit tiring sometimes because it is normally at the same venue or it is the same set, if you go on tour, it is a different story because you are at a different venue each night or there are fun things in between. If you’re shooting the same venue in Sydney or Melbourne, you know what to expect, but the crowds are going to be more or less different every time.

You’re also releasing a book of photos from the series. How did you come up with the idea to make the book to go along with the show?

The book wasn’t going to be a part of it until I printed out the 250 photos and I realised I wasn’t going to be able to fit all of them on the wall at the gallery. I have always been into photobooks, and I think it is a good way to turn photos into a tighter series. It is hard to put six years into fifteen photos, it feels like shooting yourself in the foot a little bit by not showing off all that you have. Photobooks are a nice thing for people to take away, sit with and open and close as they want.

Totally. It only makes sense. Is this your first book?

I made one just after the whole lockdown period, it was called We Used to Dance, it was loosely about Covid, but it wasn’t, I tried to avoid that as the subject. It was portraits of different musicians from a lot of bands who feature in this book, but it was portraits of them at home because they weren’t obviously on stage. It was a nice way to keep shooting and see these people who I’d see all the time at shows but capture them in a different light. This isn’t my first book but the first one of my live photos. This was different too, being live photo based and not conceptually heavy. I only started making the book a few months ago and put together the photos that I had already shot, it was nice to not have too long to make it either because then you’ll get too in your head and start coming up with concepts that don’t need to be there.

Yeah, I feel like it’s good to just get it done and commit to a date of finishing it, if you don’t have a date, you’ll just keep on editing it because it’ll never feel perfect.

Yeah, even the other day I put one photo in that I thought would be good and then I came back to it and didn’t think it was working, and put another one in, you can go back and forth forever, you know. This book isn’t conceptually heavy, so it’s nice to just throw things in and be like, yeah that looks good, keep it in and move on. It doesn’t have to read a certain way or things don’t need to be sequenced as much as a typical photobook, that also adds to the theme of the book, which is a bit chaotic, crowded, and messy.

Do you have anything else that you want to say about the project?

I just want people to enjoy it, it isn’t supposed to be taken too seriously. It is just fast and loose crowd photos that hopefully people are wowed by. I hope some people that buy the book find themselves or their friends in the book, remember shows that they’ve been to or even be inspired to go to more shows and have fun.