The DeLorean Owners Association Strikes a Pose

Photographs by Neal Slavin

C onstraints 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.”