School groups, sporting teams, wedding parties: the group photograph is ubiquitous. They appear commonplace, unambiguous in meaning - even when the sitters’ identities are unknown. While fashions and photographic technologies change over time, the group portrait retains formal qualities adopted by photographers past and present. Assemblage proposes a way to work with such found photographs to explore the significance of their ‘typicality’. There are connotations of the 'banal' within such images, but what if we pay attention to this and what are their other potential meanings? What do such images tell us about the importance of the collective photographic portrait?

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