PROGENY

Brothers and sisters tumble from giant rocks. Parents and children walk the dog, stroll under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, or weave themselves within the complex geometry of the playground. A large family resides by the pool: leaping, splashing, and resting in the water that brings them together.

These are the families in the panoramic photographs of Holger Thoss. Making up his Progeny series, Thoss’s panoramas bring forward the private joys and mysteries of family life: the richness, variety, and sense of kinship that bring people together. Thoss’ works defy traditional notions of the panoramic image, rewriting Sudeck’s landscapes and Goldbeck’s wastelands as terrains governed by people, motion, and fun. They show several people, often the same subjects appearing multiple times in the same image. They are unstable, often combinations of multiple images taken anywhere from one minute to an hour apart. They thrive on movement, people jostling in close proximity to one another. They not only represent an extended moment, they celebrate it.

Thoss is a self-described Brooklynite with a German accent. Growing up on the outskirts of Cologne, Thoss developed a deep appreciation for moments of in-between activity, often gaining inspiration from the countryside of his hometown or his family. It was only after his move to New York as a young adult that Thoss began pursuing photography as a profession. From an internship at Aperture to developing prints for Gilles Peress, Thoss learned the importance of 'living and breathing' the work he creates, citing his time at Magnum as the experience that inspired the experiential approach central to his practice.

For Thoss, two experiences sparked Progeny: a trip to post-communist Poland and starting a family of his own. While witnessing the country’s first democratic elections, Thoss captured groups of people standing side by side, looking in different directions. Intensely quiet yet paradoxically busy, the implied motion of Thoss’ Poland images inspired the playful chaos that emerges in his photos of his own family. In these images, Thoss’ sons seem to jump across time, appearing to kick soccer balls in the corner while running towards their mother’s open arms in the foreground. After showing panoramas he had taken of a family vacation to a friend, she was astounded. “You've got to do this for others,” she said - and in time, the family panoramas grew out of his other event work, “as people whose weddings I'd done then asked, `Can you do our family?'”

A multigenerational panorama taken of his family in Germany expresses the hivelike energy of Thoss’ early work. A small boat floats near the bank of a shallow river. Children, parents, and grandparents claim the landscape as their own: they wade in the water, they scramble over railings, they find tenable positions on the deck. Brought together in a single print, a family’s fifteen minutes is captured in the lure of a boat, the reflection of the water, and the pleasure of repetition.

None of the family’s faces are visible in this panorama, and that suits Thoss just fine. Obliquity, in his view, is part of the panoramic effect.  “You are not trying to show people's best side, just the side that is available to the camera,” he explains.  “It's not about what people look like – it's about what they are.”  

In a different panorama, the facial expressions of a family achieve a visibility that implies unspoken connections between people and place. Eleven figures relax by a backyard pool. Upon closer examination, eleven figures are reduced to five: a father, mother, and three children. A boy leaping to catch a ball, a jubilant cry on his lips, is the same boy laughing with his sister on his shoulders. The same sister appears again in the pool, but this time, she whips her wet hair into a fantastic pinwheel. The smile of a daughter at ease is echoed by the smile of her mother, smiling proudly with good reason. A whole afternoon, a whole dimension of generational relationships, is reflected within the motion and repetition of the panorama. “There's supposed to be too much going on,” Thoss says.  “I am trying to find different layers of images that go together, and there can be a beautiful moment in the developing process when it happens: there's too much going on, but it all goes together.”   

Thoss has created over one hundred panoramas. Some even live in the collections of Jamie Dimon and Guy Bennett. These works, family-centered and joyful, are an essential part of Thoss’ artistic practice. While meeting new families and returning to old ones for the third, fourth, or fifth time, Thoss has continued to capture the everyday existence of his own family. But in these works, Thoss sets the tripod aside and enters the image, embodying the evolving roles of son, father, and partner. Whether a new family or his own, Thoss approaches his panoramas with curiosity, immersion, and a dash of intuition. In Thoss’ words, “I don’t feel separate from what is in the image. When I do this, I am always a part of it.”

Paul Elie wrote The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a group portrait of the American Catholic writers Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day.  It received the National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. He writes for the Times, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and other publications. He’s a senior fellow in Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.