Simon Høgsberg takes people-watching to a whole new, slightly strange, and borderline obsessive level. He spent 21 months shooting a mind-blowing 97,000 images outside a single supermarket in Copenhagen. Then he used facial recognition software to create a pedestrian survey of the people rushing past for his interactive series The Grocery Store Project.
The series documents the intersecting lives of people who pass by each other almost daily, and it creates a fascinating "map" showing how these lives converge. As Høgsberg amassed the images, he began grouping those that featured the same person---a grim-looking man with red hair, a woman who wears distinctive coats. He laid them out in grids something like a Scrabble board, with the horizontal lines splitting off whenever a photo showed two different people he’d photographed. The editing took around 30 months, and the final result weaves together 457 people who happened to walk in front of his lens.
To keep everyone sorted, he gave his subjects alphanumeric names. The first person he cataloged was A1, and so forth. The map he built uses 457 people, but he identified and named 11,000 individuals. Most people ignored him, and only two said they didn’t want to be photographed. If anyone stopped to ask what he was doing he told them he was "making a visual analysis of the Danish culture."
Over time Høgsberg got drawn into his subjects' lives. They had no idea who he was, but he knew them from staring at their photos for so long. "I slowly got the sensation of becoming one with the crowd and morphing into this community," he says.
The photographer was primarily interested in identifying patterns in the chaos and the people he grew to know through the process. However, The Grocery Store Project could also be seen as a complex map of human interaction---or lack thereof. Many individuals seem intent on hurrying by, absorbed in phones or shopping. Yet, as this project shows, these people pass each other frequently, raising interesting questions about whether we notice those around us, and recognize the familiar faces of those you might see as strangers.
Høgsberg is working with his web developer Jon Bertelsen to upload all 97,000 of the individual photos to his site. While it’s hard to imagine anyone perusing all of the images, The Grocery Store Project illustrates just how elaborate and random human interaction is, even if just in front of a single shop.
