Pelle Cass

Pelle Cass (1954) is a photographer from Brookline, Massachusetts. He’s exhibited at the George Eastman House, the Albright Knox Gallery, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Metamorf Biennial for Art and Technology in Norway and has presented shows at Stux Gallery (Boston), Gallery Kayafas (Boston), and the Houston Center for Photography. His work is owned by the Fogg Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Polaroid Collection, the DeCordova Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the MFA, Houston. Cass’s photos have appeared in books such as Photoviz (Gestalten), Deleueze and the City (Edinburgh University Press), Langford’s Basic Photography (Focal Press), The Beautiful Sparkle: Optical Illusions in Art (Prestel), and in magazines such as Beaux Arts (France), McSweeney’s, FOAM, GQ, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, and many others. He’s received fellowships from Yaddo, Artists Resource Trust, and the Polaroid Collection.

A show of his series Crowded Fields opens at the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (IG: @abigailogilvy; abigailogilvy.com) in Boston on February 11, 2021 and runs through March 21 2021.

Crowded Fields

In the reshuffled time of this series of composite photographs called Crowded Fields, play prevails over competition, the stands are empty and the fields are full, and whole games are shown out of sequence. Most of the pictures were taken at lightly attended events at pools, fields, stadiums, and arenas around Boston, where I live.

To make the compositions, I put my camera on a tripod, take up to a thousand pictures, and compile selected figures into a final photograph that is kind of a still time-lapse. I change nothing—not a pixel. I simply select what to keep and what to omit. It all happened precisely as you see it, just not at the same time. Beyond matters of technique and subject matter, I hope to convey the eeriness of time, a feeling of Dionysian chaos, and a sense of play.

To view more of Pelle Cass’s work please visit his website.